The essays in this volume, by distinguished historians, deal with the correlation of the Church and society in Scotland from the birth of Bishop Kennedy at the beginning of the fifteenth century to the reunion of the Church of Scotland with most of the United Free Church in 1929. This is not a comprehensive survey of the Church and its institutions; rather the book is concerned with the careers of prominent individuals within the Church and with the response of the people to the challenge of the vast ecclesiastical changes in the five centuries under review.

The volume grew out of a two-year seminar programme organised jointly by the Departments of Ecclesiastical History and Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, and held in St John’s House, the Centre for Advanced Historical Studies in the university. Contributors: Norman Macdougall, Leslie Macfarlane, Roderick Lyall, Jenny Wormald, Michael Lynch, Roger Mason, James Kirk, Walter Mackey, Julia Buckroyd, Henry Sefton, Richard Sher, Alexander Murdoch and Ian Machin.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Bishop James Kennedy of St. Andrews: a reassessment of his political career
• 2. Was the Scottish Church reformable by 1513?
• 3. Complaint, Satire and Invective in Middle Scots Literature
• 4. ‘Princes’ and the regions in the Scottish Reformation
• 5. From privy kirk to burgh church: an alternative view of the process of Protestantisation
• 6. Covenant and Commonweal: the language of politics in Reformation Scotland
• 7. Royal and lay patronage in the Jacobean kirk, 1572-1600
• 8. Presbyterian and Canterburian in the Scottish Revolution
• 9. Anti-clericalism in Scotland during the Restoration
• 10. ‘Neu-lights and Preachers Legall’: some observations on the beginnings of Moderatism in the Church of Scotland
• 11. Patronage and Party in the Church of Scotland, 1750-1800
• 12. Voluntaryism and Reunion, 1874-1929
• Index