The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland (Boydell Press, 2021), edited by Chris R. Langley, Catherine E. McMillan and Russell Newton, is an outstanding and agenda-setting volume that puts the experience of Reformed ministers at the centre of the religious history of early modern Scotland. Long confined to the historiographical margins, ministers have been represented either in hagiography or, in the case of their most famous representatives, including John Knox, total opprobrium. This volume asks new questions of the role played by Reformed preachers, and their wives and families, in relation to kirk sessions, parish discipline, godly ideals, national agendas for political and theological change, while paying attention to the extraordinary linguistic, theological and cultural variety of early modern Scotland.
Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.
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