Contents:
Introduction Part I: Revising Religion 1. The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation Christopher Haigh 2. Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution Patrick Collinson 3. Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution Nicholas Tyacke 4. Archbishop Laud Kevin Sharpe 5. Arminianism and the Court 1625-1629 Peter White Part II: Revising Politics 6. Parliament in the Reign of Elizabeth I Geoffrey Elton 7. England in 1637 Conrad Russell 8. The Coming of War John Morrill Part III: Responding to Revisionism 9. The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England A.G. Dickens 10. Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635 Peter Lake 11. Popular Politics Before the Civil War David Underdown 12. News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-century England Richard Cust 13. Local History and the Origins of the Civil War Ann Hughes

Contents:
Introduction Part I: Revising Religion 1. The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation Christopher Haigh 2. Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution Patrick Collinson 3. Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution Nicholas Tyacke 4. Archbishop Laud Kevin Sharpe 5. Arminianism and the Court 1625-1629 Peter White Part II: Revising Politics 6. Parliament in the Reign of Elizabeth I Geoffrey Elton 7. England in 1637 Conrad Russell 8. The Coming of War John Morrill Part III: Responding to Revisionism 9. The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England A.G. Dickens 10. Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635 Peter Lake 11. Popular Politics Before the Civil War David Underdown 12. News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-century England Richard Cust 13. Local History and the Origins of the Civil War Ann Hughes

The Calvinist Reformation in Scottish towns was a radically transformative movement. It incorporated into urban ecclesiastical governance a group of laymen - the elders of the kirk session - drawn heavily from the crafts guilds as well as wealthy merchants. These men met at least weekly with the minister and comprised a parochial church court that exercised an unprecedented discipline of the lives of the ordinary citizenry. They pried into sexual behaviour, administered the hospital and other poor relief, ordered fostering of orphans, oversaw the grammar school, enforced sabbath observance, investigated charges of witchcraft, arbitrated quarrels and punished people who railed at their neighbours. In times of crisis like the great plague of 1584-85, they rationed food sent from other towns and raised an already high bar on moral discipline to avert further divine wrath. The minute books of Perth's session, established in the 1560s and surviving most fully from 1577, open a window on this religious discipline, the men who administered it, and the lay people who both resisted and facilitated it, negotiating its terms to meet their own agendas. They are presented here with full introduction and explanatory notes. Margo Todd is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.

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 unequalled 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. How was such a drastic shift accomplished and what effect did it have on the masses of people in the pew, or in the alehouse? In addressing this question Todd uses the abundance of source material from the operations of 'kirk sessions', the most local of the Calvinist church courts, which detail varied aspects of daily life: baptism, marriage and burial, poor relief and education, fasts and feasts, sexual offence and doctrinal error.She shows how the kirk sessions balanced the exercise of discipline with social service to produce a distinctively Scottish Reformed culture in which traditional ritual and drama, propitiatory devices and even imagery were not discarded, but reconstructed in a protestant guise. Holy space and holy time, however protestantised, continued to provide the anxious with comfort, and the ordinary lay person with an affective experience of the sacred. In this ground-breaking study Margo Todd has harnessed this vivid and rarely-used documentation to produce an extraordinary work of historical anthropology, and elucidate the spirituality of a people long hidden from history. Margo Todd is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of 'Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order'.

Traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the sixteenth century. They have presented puritans as creators of a disciplined, progressive, ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. The origins of modern society and politics are laid at the feet of zealous English protestants whose only intellectual debts are owed to Calvinist theology and the Bible. Professor Todd demonstrates that this view is fundamentally ahistorical. She places puritanism back in its own historical milieu, showing puritans as the heirs of a complex intellectual legacy, derived no less from the Renaissance than from the Reformation. The focus is on puritan social thought as part of a sixteenth-century intellectual consensus. This study traces the continuity of Christian humanism in the social thought of English protestants.