The Universities of Scotland, Ireland and New England during the British Civil Wars: Contested Seminaries (Boydell Press, 2024), written by Boston College alumnus Salvatore Cipriano, provides new insight into the contested nature of higher education in the British Atlantic world between the Reformation and the Enlightenment and corrects outmoded notions about the universities’ purported insularity and intellectual poverty. In Cipriano’s volume, the image that emerges of these universities is one of genuine academies of strategic importance, employed to serve the agendas of ruling powers in Scotland, Ireland, and New England. Trinity College, Dublin, Harvard College, and the Scottish universities existed on the frontiers of a deteriorating composite monarchy with a centralizing impulse, becoming battlegrounds of the mid-17th-century’s intellectual, political, and religious conflicts. Cipriano earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Boston College. He is an associate director of career coaching and education at Stanford University.