The essays in this collection treat a variety of religious topics ranging temporally from the eve of Reformation in Scotland through the Cromwellian occupation of the 1650s. The best of them demonstrate for Scotland what English historians have for generations recognised for that realm—that the old religion was alive and well right up to the eve of Reformation, and in some settings, including urban ones, was even afterward only supplanted with some reluctance by political authorities interested primarily in order and stability. Elizabeth Rhodes’s study of pious donations in St Andrews finds the strength of Catholicism rooted partly in the commitment of devout Catholics to reforming the ills of the old church, so that the line between Catholic and Protestant in the 1550s was not entirely clear to contemporaries. Accordingly, she sensibly rejects ‘sudden conversion’ as the right descriptor for what happened in 1559-60 (p. 44). Pre- and early Reformation Stirling—a town whose religious settlement has been quite neglected in the past—is shown by Tim Slonosky’s careful analysis to have been likewise the site of rather enthusiastic Catholicism right through the 1550s. Yet with very little turnover of personnel on the burgh council before and after the Reformation divide, strictly Calvinist worship and discipline were imposed from above by men who, though not themselves avid Protestants, had ‘decided to cooperate with the new religion’ (p. 67) to cement their hold on authority. The author presumes, plausibly but without direct evidence, that this was in response to popular opinion, so an uncomfortable degree of mystery remains in the story; however, he is certainly correct to point out the central importance of town councils in the process. The need for more such urban studies is evident.

The other essays are less concerned with Reformation per se than with its after-effects, in terms of intellectual and theological developments and of impact on communities. The editor’s contribution on the kirk’s poor relief suggests that aid to the destitute administered by the Reformed church was fairly comprehensive and effective, even without the imposition of a poor rate on the more secular English model. In fact, English historians have shown that the rate was not in practice widely enforced south of the Tweed, so the received version of a contrast between efficient England and slow Scotland has already been undermined. But McCallum produces anecdotal evidence that the combination of fines and collections produced a not insignificant income for the Scottish system. More specific numbers would help the argument. Turning to liturgy and sacraments, Chris Langley’s piece on Communion demonstrates efforts to bar political enemies of the Covenant from receiving the sacrament during the years of civil war and occupation, as a continuation of the traditional principle of protecting the sanctity of Communion from unworthy participation. He finds some parishes even cancelling Communions altogether during periods of the 1650s when kirk sessions were in serious doubt that the examination and discipline required by the First Book of Discipline were possible. Shifting to more narrowly intellectual history, Stephen Holmes’s essay on liturgical interpretation lends support to the sensible view that Protestantism was a culmination of a series of Catholic reformations of the old church, though in his haste to do so with a focus on the Rationalls of Durandus, he bypasses humanism altogether and treats the radicalism of the 1560 break in a remarkably off-hand manner. We can be well rid of the old Catholic/Protestant binary without throwing the baby out with the bath water. Steven Reid’s long essay on the Aberdeen Doctors asserts that these Reformed scholastics were ‘intellectually more than the sum of their tracts’, but his insistence that their approach to pedagogy was unique and ‘highly progressive’ (pp.150-51) in early modern Scotland is hard to swallow given their utter neglect of contemporary thinkers like Bacon and Descartes, and their focus on what even the author grants were ‘abstruse topics’ (p.164). Number of authors cited seems to be his main criterion for judging pedagogy ‘innovative’. English university curricula of the same early seventeenth-century era also included the neo-scholastic Bartholomew Keckermann (an Aberdeen favourite), but only alongside the authors of the New Science and an array of anti-Aristotelian humanists—surely a more ‘progressive’ approach. Daniel MacLeod’s chapter on the treason trial of John Ogilvie returns us to Catholicism, but struggles to problematise an event that is simply not a problem: it is patently obvious that for Ogilvie, as for all those Jesuits executed for treason by Elizabeth’s government in England, religion was as much an issue as was questionable loyalty in an anti-popish culture. Does it really need saying?

Roger Mason’s article concluding the volume shifts the focus from the Reformation to royal governance of the church, in England and Scotland, with a challenge to the presumption that James’ aim in ruling the kirk was to establish uniformity with English liturgical practice. Not so, he says: the king sought not religious uniformity, but simply that both the kirk and the Church of England recognize his supremacy over the church—a goal that he had met in Scotland by 1610 with the restoration of diocesan episcopacy, including by 1612 the requirement that every licenced minister must affirm the king as ‘supreme governour’ in matters spiritual as well as civic. Jacobean Britain was thus a multiple monarchy that ‘accommodated a plurality of Protestantisms’ (p. 212)—a felicitous expression. There are two problems with this view, however. First, Jacobean Scottish episcopacy was in practice far from ‘restored’, being still of the ‘reduced’ sort, with bishops sitting as moderators of presbyteries and in practice having much less control over even ordination and excommunication than the lower courts, from sessions to synods. James could manipulate General Assemblies to achieve the letter of the law he desired; however, enforcement of conformity was quite another matter in a church where so much power resided in the parish community. Despite James’ wishes, Scotland’s was never an erastian Reformation—as Charles would learn at great cost. The argument is further undermined by the ‘popish’ vestments and images James required for his 1617 visit to Scotland, his attempted imposition of kneeling for Communion in the Perth Articles of 1618, and in his last years his promotion of Arminian and ceremonialist bishops in England—known and worrisome to Scots, for good reason. While these actions paled in comparison with the Caroline programme, James cannot be completely exonerated from paving the way for the religious changes that would lead to war.