This is a richly exhaustive survey of practically every facet of Scottish religious history during the ‘long’ sixteenth century. Following Hazlitt's introduction, the volume consists of twenty-seven essays arranged across ten sections. Its focus is squarely but not exclusively upon Protestantism. The edges of Protestant mythology are thus rendered sufficiently fuzzy, making clear that Catholic thought fed into what became Scottish Protestantism. Companions such as this generally excel at synthesising the current state of research, but many of these essays also succeed at breaking new ground.
The organisation of the book is almost exclusively topical. Reformation history often yields to the temptation of vaunting a small number of (allegedly) great men over their contemporaries, but this companion thankfully avoids that tendency. Only two chapters focus upon a single individual. Jane Dawson offers a fine survey of John Knox's life and career (chapter iv); Ernest Holloway uses Andrew Melville to illuminate the impact of European humanism within and beyond Scottish Protestantism (chapter xiii). Scotland's religious transformation thus appears not as the work of singular individuals, but of many people and even sometimes-conflicting movements over a longue durée.
Catholic reform is a minor but important thread throughout. The volume's first section contains two chapters on religious reform before the 1560s, both of which survey the state of religious flux well beyond sixteenth-century Scotland. These essays reach back to fifteenth-century developments, and both also touch, albeit briefly, upon the work of Hermann von Wied, archbishop of Cologne. Especially interesting is Flynn Cratty's discussion (chapter ii) of debates about ecclesial authority in the Scottish Church during the 1550s; he offers considerable detail about the sixteenth-century use of fifteenth-century conciliar councils. Although Catholicism was overthrown in the 1560s, subsequent chapters make clear that its influence was harder to extirpate. For example, in chapter vii, David Mullan looks at how Scottish Catholics engaged their Protestant opponents; chapter xxii by R. Scott Spurlock considers Catholic survival into the seventeenth century.
Many of the essays emphasise contestation over the boundaries of correct belief and practice, and how Scottish Protestants sought to limit and transform their Catholic inheritance. John McCallum's survey of regional variations in reform (chapter v) is an excellent case in point. Alexander Broadie's survey of philosophy in the Scottish Reformation (chapter viii) is much the same; even arguments against Aristotelian metaphysics were made in Aristotelian terms. The whole of section iv (chapters ix–xii) concerns the pursuit of a discrete form of Protestant worship and culture, but also reveals that preaching, the order of service, liturgical music and architecture were sites of iconoclastic inconsistency as much as iconoclastic transformation. The same is true of the legal imposition of new Protestant norms. In chapter xv, Thomas Green offers a genuinely fascinating overview of church courts before, during, and after 1560. It is a crucial contribution given how extensive the Catholic court system was up through about 1500, and the fact that canon law was, for a very long time in Christian history, at least as important as theology in ordering the Catholic Church. Finally, chapters xviii (on popular festivities) and xix (on burial) reveal the back-and-forth of religious dispute in the most intimate areas of life. Clearly, history has no real breaks.
But this would have been news to those who aimed to extirpate every last vestige of what they considered idolatry. Perhaps surprisingly, the organisation of the companion falters when it comes to highlighting the success of Protestantism. David Mullan's survey of ‘Reformation thought’ (chapter vi) offers a coherent overview of the sudden arrival of Protestantism in sixteenth-century Europe. The volume does not escape the gravitational pull of Martin Luther's name; in Mullan's words, ‘The uniformity of western Christendom was shattered in the early 16th century by Martin Luther’ (p. 150). It is a familiar enough claim, and one that many readers will likely take no issue with, but it fits somewhat awkwardly with those essays that erode such old-fashioned Protestant swagger. Perhaps the problem is that we really don't know how to frame a religious transformation that, after revisionism, has come to seem quite inexplicable. In his introduction, Hazlitt writes that the ‘overarching [aim of the book] is to help enhance the contour of Scottish Reformation studies and increase awareness of them on the larger map of the European Reformation of which it was umbilically a part’ (p. 1). And this is fair enough. It is just that the volume's organisation doesn't vindicate the claim so much as undermine it. Why start with Catholic reform (chapters i and ii) if Luther was the real instigator of change?
None the less, Protestantism ultimately won out. In some instances, this clearly led to longer-term regret. Section vii (chapters xvii–xix) opens with Mark Sweetnam noting that, as the canon of Scottish literature was created in the nineteenth century, considerable opprobrium was poured upon Calvinism as ‘an alien irruption into, and disruption of, a pre-Protestant society’ (p. 445). But other chapters, such as xiv (on education) and xvi (on discipline), reveal that by the late sixteenth century, Scottish Protestant leaders succeeded in creating structures that would perpetuate their values for many generations to come. Sometimes this redefined social roles and other relations across the British Isles. Elizabeth Ewan's unassumingly titled ‘Gendering the Reformation’ (chapter xx) deftly charts the crucial role played by women, both real and legendary, in the Reformation of Scotland. Reformation also affected the borders of Scottish identity, as revealed by Hazlitt's essay on Gaelic Scotland (chapter xxi) and Arthur Williamson's comparison of diverse visions of Britain (chapter xxv). These transformations also extend to the writing of history, as revealed by the two concluding chapters on the historiography of the Reformation of Scotland. The longue durée is also a long argument.
The Companion is encyclopaedic. Although greater attention could have been given to monarchy and episcopalianism as counterweights to the pursuit of reformation, one subject begs for, but does not receive, sustained consideration: resistance theory. Alan MacDonald's essay (chapter xxiii) comes closest with its analysis of the relations between Church and State; further insights are provided in chapter iii, with Kristen Walton's discussion of the tumultuous decade from 1557 to 1567, and in chapter xxiv, with Paul Goatman's survey of the sometimes-surprising fractures surrounding the National Covenant. But resistance theory, with its close ties to apocalyptic speculation, was a consistent line of Protestant theology and argument that extended from Knox through the adoption of the National Covenant. A focused analysis on point would have been welcome.
None the less, this is a really fantastic volume, integrating past insights even as it pursues new avenues of research. It is a most welcome contribution to the study of the Scottish Reformation.
