Historiography of the Scottish Reformation: The Catholics Fight Back?

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 303-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mark Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Church History ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The University ◽  
Roman Catholics

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in the Records of the Scottish Church History Society: ‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’s History, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Stewart J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Church History ◽  
Western World ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Church

The theme of this fifty-fourth volume of Studies in Church History is ‘The Church and Empire’, and the twenty-three articles included here explore the complex and ever-evolving relationship of ecclesiastical and imperial power within a range of historical contexts. The articles represent plenary addresses and a selection of the communications presented at two highly successful Ecclesiastical History Society conferences during my presidential year – a Summer Conference held at the University of Edinburgh in July 2016 and a Winter Meeting held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in January 2017. Both conferences attracted a large number of speakers and participants from across the world, and reflected the considerable scholarly interest in questions concerning the relations of Church and empire. These questions include the extent to which Christianity in the Western world became linked to the political power of large imperial states, the nature and extent of the connection of Christianity to the expansion of Western imperialism in the early modern and modern periods, and the manner in which the Church often came into conflict with imperial power, especially when Christians insisted on the spiritual independence of the Church and on maintaining an independent Christian moral witness against the wars of conquest, cruelty, racism, oppression and arrogance of power that too often have been associated with imperial rule.

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