The troubles of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland were the final episode in a long revolutionary process which had begun more than a century earlier. The changes of the intervening years – most of them gradual and imperceptible – were barely visible but their cumulative impact was profound. Charles I inherited a social revolution; he found a society already transformed and a power structure still in the process of transformation. Scotland was inherently unstable, and the unending conflict between king, baron and churchman was therefore accentuated. The failure of the Canterburian solution left magnate to struggle with minister for control of the Church and thus for the substance of power in Scotland. The struggle was often obscured by war: the feudal magnates, bold in defence of the ancient liberties of the kingdom, patched up an uneasy alliance with the radical ministers pursuing a new order. The end of the First Civil War was merely the prelude to a new conflict, which left the Kirk triumphant for the time being and the state, albeit temporarily, its impotent servant. This poses vital questions. Who were the ministers and elders who ruled the Church of Scotland? What was the nature of the Scottish Revolution? This book draws on many sources to answer these questions.

Uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable one-volume reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church. It contains over 6,000 cross-referenced A-Z entries, and offers unrivalled coverage of all aspects of this vast and often complex subject, including theology, churches and denominations, patristic scholarship, the bible, the church calendar and its organization, popes, archbishops, saints, and mystics. In this revision, innumerable small changes have been made to take into account shifts in scholarly opinion, recent developments, such as the Church of England's new prayer book (Common Worship), RC canonizations, ecumenical advances and mergers, and, where possible, statistics. A number of existing articles have been rewritten to reflect new evidence or understanding, for example the Holy Sepulchre entry, and there are a few new articles. Perhaps most significantly, a great number of the bibliographies have been updated. Established since its first appearance in 1957 as an essential resource for ordinands, clergy, and members of religious orders, ODCC is an invaluable tool for academics, teachers, and students of church history and theology, as well as for the general reader.

What did it mean to be a Covenanter?

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

This volume looks at the way that perceptions of Scottish identity have changed through the centuries, from early medieval to modern times. 'The idea of Scotland as a single country, corresponding to the realm of the king of Scots, and of the Scots as all the kingdom's inhabitants, may only have taken root during the 13th century.' – Dauvit Broun 'The 18th century is marked by a period of often competing Scottish identities, and the emergence of the British state as a complicating factor in the equation.' – R. J. Finlay 'Scottish identity has never been a fixed, immutable idea, whether held in the head or in the gut . . . some of the most enduring myths of Scotland's Protestant identity were, like Ireland's Catholic identity, creations of the 19th century: they included Jenny Geddes as a Protestant Dame Scotia, throwing a stool into the works of an Anglican-style church, and the Magdalen Chapel in Edinburgh, the home of a staunchly Catholic graft guild throughout much of the 1560s becoming the "workshop of the Reformation" in John Knox's time.' – Michael Lynch

In 1843 the Church of Scotland split apart. In the Disruption, as it was called, those who left to form the Free Church of Scotland claimed they did so because the law denied congregations the freedom to elect their own pastor. As they saw it, this fundamental Christian right had been usurped by lay patrons, who, by the Patronage Act of 1712, had been given the privilege of choosing and presenting parish ministers. But lay patronage was nothing new to the Church in Scotland, and to this day it remains an acceptable practice south of the border. What were the issues that made Scotland different? To date, little work has been done on the history of Scottish lay patronage and how antipathy to it developed. In A Great Grievance, Laurence Whitley traces the way attitudes ebbed and flowed from earliest times, and then in the main body of the book, looks at the place of Scottish lay patronage in the extraordinary and complex period in British history that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The book examines some of the myths and controversies that sprung up and draws some unexpected conclusions.

First full study of the life and career of the Glaswegian minister Robert Baillie, establishing his significance and influence

The Protestant Reformation of 1560 is widely acknowledged as being a watershed moment in Scottish history. However, whilst the antecedents of the reform movement have been widely explored, the actual process of establishing a reformed church in the parishes in the decades following 1560 has been largely ignored. This book helps remedy the situation by examining the foundation of the reformed church and the impact of Protestant discipline in the parishes of Fife. In early modern Scotland, Fife was both a distinct and important region, containing a preponderance of coastal burghs as well as St Andrews, the ecclesiastical capital of medieval Scotland. It also contained many rural and inland parishes, making it an ideal case study for analysing the course of religious reform in diverse communities. Nevertheless, the focus is on the Reformation, rather than on the county, and the book consistently places Fife's experience in the wider Scottish, British and European context. Based on a wide range of under-utilised sources, especially kirk session minutes, the study's focus is on the grass-roots religious life of the parish, rather than the more familiar themes of church politics and theology. It evaluates the success of the reformers in affecting both institutional and ideological change, and provides a detailed account of the workings of the reformed church, and its impact on ordinary people. In so doing it addresses important questions regarding the timescale and geographical patterns of reform, and how such dramatic religious change succeeded and endured without violence, or indeed, widespread opposition.

Focusing on the impact of Continental religious warfare on the society, politics and culture of English, Scottish and Irish Protestantism, this study is concerned with the way in which British identity developed in the early Stuart period.

This is the third volume in The History of the Scottish Parliament. In volumes 1 and 2 the contributors addressed discrete episodes in political history from the early thirteenth century through to 1707, demonstrating the richness of the sources for such historical writing and the importance of parliament to that history. In Volume 3 the contributors have built on that foundation and taken advantage of the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to discuss a comprehensive range of key themes in the development of parliament. The editors, Keith M. Brown and Alan R. MacDonald, have assembled a team of established and younger scholars who each discuss a theme that ranges over the entire six centuries of the parliament's existence. These include broad, interpretive chapters on each of the key political constituencies represented in parliament. Thus Roland Tanner and Gillian MacIntosh write on parliament and the crown, Roland Tanner and Kirsty McAlister discuss parliament and the church, Keith Brown addresses parliament and the nobility and Alan MacDonald examines parliament and the burghs. Cross-cutting themes are also analysed. The political culture of parliament is the subject of a chapter by Julian Goodare, while parliament and the law, political ideas and social control are dealt with in turn by Mark Godfrey, James Burns and Alastair Mann. Finally, parliament's own procedures are also discussed by Alastair Mann. The History of the Scottish Parliament: Parliament in Context offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the workings and significance of this important institution to the history of late medieval and early modern Scotland.