Poor Relief and the Church in Scotland, 1560–1650. John McCallum. Scottish Religious Cultures Historical Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. xii + 268 pp. £75.
ventional Presbyterian accounts of the Scottish Reformation. Rhodes offers no detailed analysis of that upheaval, nor does she consider Catholic reform efforts before 1559–60. Her view of it flashes occasionally: she speaks of “murderers,” “Reformist mobs,” the “Protestant mob,” “terrorism,” and “opportunism” (88, 96, 199, 108, 162), and concludes with the long, sad decline of post-Reformation St. Andrews. Although her account extends to 1580, effectively 1599, Andrew Melville never surfaces. Fortunately, James Melville does appear (though, oddly, not in her index). The study remains sharply focused; the broader intellectual significance of figures like Robert Pont never intrudes. Rhodes does narrate in some detail the various compromises emerging from Edinburgh during the 1560s and thereafter that sought to accommodate the older order with the new. The results, she shows, were not altogether happy. Church properties became vulnerable to aristocratic expropriation and cynical manipulation, with management mechanisms less successful than in the preReformation era. These circumstances limited the Reformation’s ambitious social program. The volume retains something of the feel of a doctoral dissertation, replete with detailed tables at the end. This is misleading. It is a study of the first importance that will reframe discussion of this axial period.