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Historiography of the Scottish Reformation: The Catholics Fight Back?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Stephen Mark Holmes
Stephen Mark Holmes*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in the Records of the Scottish Church History Society: ‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’s History, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).

Type
Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 303 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the 2011 conference of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association in Edinburgh. I thank Owen Dudley Edwards for his comments on it.

References

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4 John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, ed. William Croft Dickinson, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1949), 1: 6; a new critical edition is to be published by T. & T. Clark in 2013: John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, ed. James Kirk and Margaret Sanderson.

5 Winzet, Ninian, Certaine Tractates, together with the book of four score and three questions and a translation of Vincentius Lirinensis, ed. Hewison, James King, 2 vols, Scottish Text Society 15, 22 (Edinburgh, 1888, 1890; first publ. 1562)Google Scholar; idem, De origine, moribus, et rebus gestis Scotorum (Rome, 1578); idem, The history of Scotland, from the death of King James I. in the year M.CCCC.XXXVI. to the year M.D.LXI, ed. Thomas Thomson, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh, 1830); idem, The historie of Scotland wrytten first in Latin by the most reuerend and worthy Jhone Leslie, bishop of Rosse, and translated in Scottish by Father James Dalrymple … 1596, ed. Elphege George Cody, 2 vols, Scottish Text Society 19, 34 (Edinburgh, 1888, 1895).

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17 Ryrie, Alec, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester, 2006), 5.Google Scholar In 1979 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland opposed the appointment of a Roman Catholic to the chair of theology in the divinity faculty of Edinburgh University: Brown, S.J., ‘Presbyterians and Catholics in Twentieth-Century Scodand’, in idem and Newlands, G., eds, Scottish Christianity in the Modern World (Edinburgh, 2000), 255–81.Google Scholar The chair of church history at Edinburgh was held by ministers until 1988, but even in the 1970s the subject was described as ‘a secular discipline within a divinity Faculty’: Wright, David and Badcock, Gary, Disruption to Diversity: Edinburgh Divinity 1846–1996 (Edinburgh, 1996), 181, 109.Google Scholar

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19 SCA, GD 13/1/1/1, ‘Constitution of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association 1950–1951’.

20 ‘Miscellany: The Scottish Catholic Historical Committee’, InR 1 (1950), 67. They were: Fr Anthony Ross OP; Fr David McRoberts; Fr John McKee, archivist at Blairs junior seminary; Br Clare (Dr James Handley); Dr J. H. Bums; Dr Donald Nicholl; Anna Macdonald, Dowanhill Training College; Anthony Hepburn, the Mitchell Library; Peter Anson; and John Durkan and James Moffat, schoolteachers from Glasgow: John Durkan, ‘Our First Half-Century’, InR 50 (1999), i-vi.

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23 Durkan, John and Ross, Anthony, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961)Google Scholar, first published in InR 9 (1958), 1–167.

24 SCA, GD 13/226/14, John Durkan to David McRoberts, 26 December 1951.

25 InR 1 (1950), 158–63.

26 McRoberts, David, ed., Essays on the Scottish Reformation 1513–1625 (Glasgow, 1962).Google Scholar

27 SCA, GD 13/2/3/1/8, SCHA committee meeting minutes, 9 February 1957.

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29 Donaldson, Gordon, The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar. Mackie, J. D., Donaldson’s predecessor as Historiographer Royal, wrote that Donaldson’s aim was ‘to debunk some cherished beliefs of Presbyterians and to suggest that Episcopalianism is a better thing’: review of The Scottish Reformation, EHR 76 (1961), 715–17.Google Scholar

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32 Hillerbrand, Hans J., ‘Was there a Reformation in the Sixteenth Century?’, ChH 72 (2003), 525–52, at 527.Google Scholar

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34 Hughes, Philip, The Reformation in England, 3 vols (London, 1950-4)Google Scholar; Vidmar, English Catholic Historians, 2.

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36 Published as McRoberts, David and Holmes, Stephen Mark, Lost Interiors: The Furnishing of Scottish Churches in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 2012).Google Scholar

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40 Dilworth, Mark, Scottish Monasteries in the Late Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1995)Google Scholar; idem, Monasteries and the Reformation in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2010); Lynch, Michael, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981).Google Scholar On Scottish studies of the Reformation in the localities, see Ian Cowan’s Historical Association pamphlet, Regional Aspects of the Scottish Reformation (London, 1978); Margaret Sanderson’s preface to her Ayrshire and the Reformation: People and Change, 1490–1600 (East Linton, 1997).

41 Devine, T. M., ed., Scotland’s Shame? Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 2000)Google Scholar; Bruce, Steve et al., Sectarianism in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2004)Google Scholar; Scottish Executive, Sectarianism: Update on Action Plan on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2007)Google Scholar. See also the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012, of the Scottish Government.

42 ‘Annie I. Dunlop: A Memoir by Dr Ian B. Cowan’, in Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Clement VII, ed. Charles Burns (Edinburgh, 1976), ix-xviii.

43 Of the early years of the SCHA, Durkan wrote that ‘the approach owed something to Vatican Council II’, which was announced in 1959 and used the results of the non-polemical Catholic historical theology of thinkers such as Congar, Yves and de Lubac, Henri: ‘Father Anthony Ross, O.P.:A Memoir’, InR 44 (1993), 113–18, at 116.Google Scholar

44 Catholicism in Scotland, like the law, education and the Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches, is organized on a Scottish rather than British basis. Ross was a friend of MacDiarmid, co-authoring with him and Campbell Maclean John Knox (Edinburgh, 1976), and he also allowed George Mackay Brown to put on plays in the basement of his Edinburgh priory: Durkan, ‘Anthony Ross’.

45 McRoberts, and Holmes, , Lost Interiors; McRoberts, David, ‘The Scottish Church and Nationalism in the Fifteenth Century’, InR 19 (1968), 3–14 Google Scholar; Ditchburn, David, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scodand’, in Boardman, Steve and Williamson, Eila, eds, The Cult of Saints and the Virgin Mary in Medieval Scotland (Woodbridge, 2010), 177–94.Google Scholar

46 This is Alec Ryrie’s criticism of McRoberts’s ‘otherwise splendid collection of Essays on the Scottish Reformation’: Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 6. It was also an aspect of the contemporary ‘new Catholic historiography’ of the Reformation elsewhere in Europe: Hillerbrand, ‘Was there a Reformation?’, 531.

47 ODNB, s.n. ‘Gordon, William (d. 1577)’, online at <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11085>, accessed 8 August 2011.

48 McRoberts described him as ‘an able man without any specific religious convictions who was intent on making his career in the church be it Catholic or Calvinist’: Essays on the Scottish Reformation, xix. McRoberts’s opinion is criticized by Linda Dunbar, Reforming the Scottish Church: John Winram (c.1492–1582) and the Example of Fife (Aldershot, 2002), 4.

49 See nn. 26, 39 above.

50 Cameron, James K., ‘Catholic Reform in Germany and in the pre-1560 Church in Scotland’, RSCHS 20 (1979), 105–17 Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Cologne Reformation and the Church of Scotland’, JEH 30 (1979), 39–64; Ryrie, Alec, ‘Reform without Frontiers in the Last Years of Catholic Scodand’, EHR 119 (2004), 27–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Origins of the Scottish Reformation; idem, ‘Paths not Taken in the British Reformations’, HistJ 52 (2009), 1–22; Dunbar, Reforming the Scottish Church.

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