Search results
This book examines the changing nature of Catholicism in modern Scotland by placing a significant emphasis on women religious. It highlights the defining role they played in the transformation and modernisation of the Catholic Church as it struggled to cope with unprecedented levels of Irish migration. The institutions and care-networks that these women established represented a new age in social welfare that served to connect the church with Scotland's emerging civil society. The book examines how the church reacted to liberalism, legislative reform, the rise of evangelicalism and the continued growth of Irish migration between the late 1820s and the late 1850s. A mutual aversion to the Irish and a loyalty to nation and state inspired a recusant and ultramontane laity to invest heavily in a programme of church transformation and development. The recruitment of the Ursulines of Jesus, the first community of nuns to return to Scotland since the Reformation, is highlighted as a significant step towards legitimising Catholic respectability. The book focuses on the recruitment and influence of women religious. It also focuses on the issue of identity by considering how gender and ethnicity influenced the development of these religious communities and how this was connected with the broader campaign to transform Catholic culture in Scotland. The book also examines the development of Catholic education in Scotland between the late 1840s and 1900 and prioritises the role played by women religious in this process.
1 Scotland’s Catholic Church before emancipation For much of the period between the Reformation and the nineteenth century, Catholicism existed on the periphery of Scottish society, its survival fraught with uncertainty in an atmosphere of institutionalised anti-Catholicism and extreme poverty. The Scottish Mission, a term used to describe the Catholic Church in Scotland between 1603 and 1878, when it had no formal governing hierarchy, had been thrown into complete disarray by the Reformation. Those who remained Catholics went underground, keeping their
10 The Scottish Covenanters James Coleman A bloody sword! A bloody sword! Forged and furbish’d by the Lord! For thee, O Scotland! ’tis unsheathed – From thy martyr’d saints bequeathed!1 T his verse, taken from ‘Renwick’s Visit to the Death-Bed of Peden’, by the public lecturer and poet James Dodds (1817–74), is one of a multitude of nineteenth-century texts articulating the debt Scotland owed to the seventeenth- century Covenanters. With a peculiarly Victorian combination of fiery rhetoric and tearful sentimentality, the poem depicts the moment when the
5 Beyond the witch trials Witchcraft and magic in Scotland Witchcraft and magic in eighteenth-century Scotland Peter Maxwell-Stuart On 20 October 1711 Defoe published in the periodical Review his well-known and unambiguous opinion on the subject of witches: There are, and ever have been such People in the World, who converse Familiarly with the Devil, enter into Compact with him, and receive Power from him, both to hurt and deceive, and these have been in all Ages call’d Witches, and it is these, that our Law and God’s Law Condemn’s as such; and I think there
This book examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. Part I looks at what the living did to influence the dead and at how the dead were believed to influence the living in turn. It shows that the living and the dead shared a reciprocal relationship of obligation and assistance, and that the bonds between the two groups were especially strong when they involved blood or guild kinship. Part II considers the overlapping communities in Scottish towns where people could personalize religious expression in a meaningful social context. Part III focuses on the period between 1350 and 1560 as one of disruption and development. It assesses weaknesses in the Scottish ecclesiastical structure and instances of religious dissent, and then it considers the Scottish Church’s response to these challenges. Two main arguments run through the book. The first is that most laypeople in Scottish towns continued to participate in orthodox Catholic practices right through to the mid-sixteenth century. The second major argument is that Catholic religious practices in Scottish towns underwent a significant shift between 1350 and 1560. This shift, which is most easily perceived when Scotland is considered within the broader European transition from the medieval to the early modern period, brought with it a kind of pre-Reformation reformation in religious practice.
churches in England, Scotland and Ireland, sustained by a consensus that secure and stable government required religious conformity throughout the three kingdoms. By 1711, however, Episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland and Presbyterianism re-established; Protestant dissenters in England had been granted religious toleration in 1689; and, in Ireland, the rapid growth of Protestant nonconformist congregations continually
This book is about one of the most extraordinary national transformations in European history. During 1559 and 1560, the kingdom of Scotland experienced what was arguably the first modern revolution. The book aims to present a new synthesis of ideas on the origins of the Scottish Reformation, building on the recent scholarship but also suggesting some new directions. It asks not only why the Scottish Reformation took place, but why this Reformation took place, rather than one of the many other 'Reformations' - and, indeed, counter-Reformations - that seemed possible in sixteenth-century Scotland. It tries to reconnect religion and politics, and to trace their interaction. In particular, it emphasises how acts or threats of violence drove political processes and shaped religious culture. Violence isolated moderates and aggravated division. Sometimes it discredited those who applied it. Equally often, it managed to destroy its targets, and those who refused to use violence were outmanoeuvred. As such this is a tale of few villains and fewer heroes. The book also tries to place the Scottish Reformation on the wider stage of the European Reformation. Despite the nationalism of the traditional accounts, and of much Scottish history in general, the Reformation's natural stage was all Europe. The Scottish Reformation can be illuminated by international comparisons, and it was itself an international phenomenon. Religious developments in England and France, in particular, were a decisive influence on Scottish events.
’s family briefly came under the duke’s protection. However, they became involved in resisting the Norman invaders and in 1068 Margaret was forced to seek ‘shelter’ in Scotland along with her mother and siblings. She subsequently married the Scottish king Malcolm III in 1069 or 1070, died at Edinburgh Castle on 16 November 1093, and was buried before the high altar in Dunfermline Priory Church. She was canonised in 1249–50. 2 Relatively few accounts of Margaret’s life survive, 3 but those that do emphasise her literacy and learning to a
that erupted in the Churches of England and Scotland under the Laudian administration of the 1630s. The discussion will then turn to the godly ministers’ mobilisation of opposition to Convocations’ new canons of 1640. It will be argued that the opposition to the canons revitalised the godly clergy as a political force and ushered in a somewhat cautious movement seeking further reformation of the polity of the Church of England. The London godly scene in the 1630s The origins of the London presbyterian movement that
’. Their wealth and blood had been ventured to ensure the reformation of religion and the liberties of the subject against the predations of a misguided monarch. 2 Despite new wars and the rise of a radical parliamentarian counternarrative, this presbyterian vision of Parliament’s aims was almost attained in the period from September 1647 to the revolution of early 1649. This chapter will analyse how the London presbyterian ministers, nudged by their Scottish counterparts, rebuilt the religious presbyterian cause in London and, indeed