Stephen Mark Holmes. Sacred Signs in Reformation Scotland

Recent work in Scottish history has done much to reveal the nature and scope of religious change in the sixteenth century. Protestant historiography from 1560 onward has described this period as a time when the new Protestant Reformed Church triumphed over a corrupt and ineffectual Catholic Church. This traditional narrative has been subjected to searching critiques in the last few decades. With Sacred Signs in Reformation Scotland: Interpreting Worship, 1488–1590, Stephen Mark Holmes hammers another nail into the coffin by using a strikingly original and multidisciplinary approach to examine contemporary understandings of the signs and symbols of the Christian liturgy. This book will appeal to those interested in the history of religion, the book, education, and material culture. The focus of Sacred Signs in Reformation Scotland is on “liturgical interpretation,” a term that Holmes defines as “the application of the methods of patristic and medieval biblical exegesis to public worship” (11). The book studies the way in which medieval and early modern Scottish ecclesiastics examined how the liturgy, with its appeal to the senses through its words, objects, and actions, conveyed an inner spiritual meaning. Most influential of all for later writers was William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum (1286), which is discussed in detail in chapter 1 in order to introduce readers to the “Durandus method” of liturgical commentary.

Appeal · Art · Demonology · English Reformation · Exegesis · Interpretation (philosophy) · Literature · Liturgy · Protestantism · Theology · Worship · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies