The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century brought a radical shift from a profoundly sensual and ceremonial experience of religion to the dominance of the word through Book and sermon. In Scotland, the revolution assumed proportions unequaled by any other national Calvinist Reformation, with Christmas and Easter formally abolished, sabbaths turned to fasting days, and mandatory attendance of weekday as well as Sunday sermons strictly enforced as part of an invasive disciplinary regimen.

A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland deals with the making, shaping, and development of the Scottish Reformation. 28 authors offer new analyses of various features of a religious revolution and select personalities in evolving theological, cultural, and political contexts.

This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 is one of the most controversial events in Scottish history, and a turning point in the history of Britain and Europe. Yet its origins remain mysterious, buried under competing Catholic and Protestant versions of the story. Drawing on fresh research and recent scholarship, this book provides the first full narrative of the question. Going beyond the heroic certainties of John Knox, this book recaptures the lived experience of the early Reformation: a bewildering, dangerous and exhilarating period in which Scottish (and British) identity was remade.

The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism offers a comprehensive assessment of John Calvin and the tradition of Calvinism as it evolved from the sixteenth century to today. Featuring contributions from scholars who present the latest research on a pluriform religious movement that became a global faith. The volume focuses on key aspects of Calvin's thought and its diverse reception in Europe, the transatlantic world, Africa, South America, and Asia. Calvin's theology was from the beginning open to a wide range of interpretations and was never a static body of ideas and practices. Over the course of his life his thought evolved and deepened while retaining unresolved tensions and questions that created a legacy that was constantly evolving in different cultural contexts. Calvinism itself is an elusive term, bringing together Christian communities that claim a shared heritage but often possess radically distinct characters. The Handbook reveals fascinating patterns of continuity and change to demonstrate how the movement claimed the name of the Genevan reformer but was moulded by an extraordinary range of religious, intellectual and historical influences, from the Enlightenment and Darwinism to indigenous African beliefs and postmodernism. In its global contexts, Calvinism has been continuously reimagined and reinterpreted. This collection throws new light on the highly dynamic and fluid nature of a deeply influential form of Christianity.

Exploring processes of religious change in early-modern Scotland, this collection of essays takes a long-term perspective to consider developments in belief, identity, church structures and the social context of religion from the late-fifteenth century through to the mid-seventeenth century. The volume examines the ways in which tensions and conflicts with origins in the mid-sixteenth century continued to impact upon Scotland in the often violent seventeenth century, while also tracing deep continuities in Scotland's religious, cultural and intellectual life. The essays, the fruits of new research in the field, are united by a concern to appreciate fully the ambiguity of religious identity in post-Reformation Scotland, and to move beyond simplistic notions of a straightforward and unidirectional transition from Catholicism to Protestantism.

The first survey to utilise the approaches of the new cultural history in analysing how Reformation Europe came about.