The Reformation Era · 1560-1650 · Scotland
The Scottish Reformation & Kirk
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About This Movement
In 1560 the Scottish Parliament abolished papal authority and adopted a Reformed confession of faith, and the church that followed set out to remake a whole nation rather than a single city: a minister and a school in every parish, and in each parish a kirk session of elders meeting to deal with quarrels, drunkenness, broken promises and sexual misconduct. Those session registers survive in extraordinary quantity, which makes Scotland the best-documented case anywhere of church discipline as it was actually administered. Usually over small matters, among neighbours who then had to go on living beside each other. The Kirk's covenanting instinct, the idea of a whole people bound to God by public oath, came to a head in the National Covenant of 1638 and in the conflicts that followed it.
Sources
- John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland (ed. Dickinson, 1949) and Works (ed. Laing) (primary) — A partisan, first-person history written by one of the movement's own protagonists. The Kirk went on to outgrow Knox himself.
- Scots Confession (1560), First Book of Discipline (1560), Second Book of Discipline (1578), Book of Common Order (primary) — A national church's own self-design.
- Kirk-session registers: Register of the St Andrews Kirk Session 1559-1600 (ed. Hay Fleming, SHS, 1889-90), with Perth, Aberdeen, and rural session books (primary) — Shows day-to-day church discipline at a national scale, filtered through the institutional concerns of the session itself. The claim that these records are 'denser than Geneva's' rests on Margo Todd's authority and hasn't been independently checked.
- The National Covenant (1638) with subscription records; Archibald Johnston of Wariston's Diary; the Scottish Psalter (primary) — Covenanted piety seen from inside one intense, first-person conscience, with psalm-singing as an ordinary devotional voice.
- Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (Yale, 2002), with Jane Dawson, John Knox (Yale, 2015) (secondary) — The current standard work on lived Kirk discipline, built on the session registers, along with the current standard biography of Knox.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6 (reference) — This volume has no chapter dedicated to Scotland; the closest is chapter 8, by Benedict.