Literature and the Scottish Reformation

The Scottish Reformation did not take place overnight: it took decades to embed in the Scottish subconscious, to achieve conviction not mere conformity. And its seeds were sown, their form now hotly debated, in the decades prior to 1560. Covering a similarly long period from the 1530s through to the mid-seventeenth century, this volume of essays by historians and literary scholars examines the literature, largely religious, produced to evangelise, legitimise, secure, and occasionally to defy the eventual establishment of the Presbyterian kirk of Scotland. It is informative and stimulating in its scope, and in the challenges it presents to orthodox conclusions regarding the dire effect of the Reformation on the vibrancy of early modern Scottish literature. And in its central aim—as Crawford Gribben sets it out—to recover and recognise the significance of such writings within the religious and political contexts of this reforming age, the volume more than succeeds. It is for others now to take up the reins offered, and to move the focus from the ‘greats’ of the Reformation—from John Knox, David Lindsay, and James VI and I, and others almost as well known (though there is strangely little here on Andrew Melville)—to the wider body of literature, even the few female writers

Aesthetics · Conformity · Conviction · Of Reformation · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Scope (computer science · Subconscious · Theology · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity