In this collection of essays, historians and textual scholars explore several facets of Reformation Scotland's “literary cultures” (2). Part 1 looks at the broad historical and linguistic contexts of early modern Scottish literature, part 2 comprises readings of a series of Reformation-era texts, and part 3 looks at reception.

The introduction and first chapter, by Crawford Gribben and David Mullan, provide an overview of the process of self-conscious exclusion of reformed texts from the Scottish literary canon as it developed; they then use a series of textual samplings to demonstrate that theological writing, the core of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, was in no way monolithically Protestant (or later Presbyterian) in form. Marina Dossena, building on another theme highlighted by Gribben, notes that while pre-Reformation linguistic controversies were more likely to focus on whether to write in the vernacular or Latin rather than in Scots or English, from Knox onward there was an increasing trend to use Anglicized word forms in religious writing. As a result, by the mid-seventeenth century usage of Scots was largely confined to private writings such as diaries.

While overall the range and quality of discussion in this collection is impressive, some chapters are weaker in terms of methodology and argument in comparison with the other essays. David Allan surveys the development of neo-Latin in Scotland, and captures well the technically demanding and “intensely cerebral” (65) nature of the movement, its appeal to a narrow and self-contained group of Scottish intellectuals on one hand, and its much wider resonance with a Latinate Europe on the other. Allan suggests that Scottish authors have a distinctive preoccupation with philosophy and metaphysics, but this conclusion is drawn solely from material that exists in translation. Taking this approach also results in a narrative in which Scottish neo-Latin begins in France with George Buchanan, then jumps to Mark Alexander Boyd and several poets translated in the Musa Latina Aberdonensis (William Barclay, Thomas Dempster, and Arthur Johnston), and ends with a single page discussing the thirty-seven authors of the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637). Exploring other authors beyond this translated boundary would reveal a very different narrative with equally different textual emphases. Amanda Piesse considers David Lindsay's Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis as a continuance of medieval morality plays and highlights how its events, literary devices, and stage directions encourage a blending of allegory and morality to remind the audience how easy it is to be seduced by sin. Rudolph Almasy argues that Knox uses a rhetorical strategy in A Godly Letter of Warning (1554) that first identifies him with Jeremiah but which soon cedes to a Pauline vision of a pastor urging his English audience to embrace their own communities. While both chapters are thought provoking, they lack enough breadth or context to show why their findings are significant, in either literary or historical terms.

The readings in chapters 6–9 are the high point of the collection. Kenneth Farrow analyzes the rhetorical strategies used in three responses to Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet (1558): John Aylmer's written reply to the text and the more general tracts answering Knox by Ninian Winzet and Quentin Kennedy. In doing so he provides a clear and succinct study of two of the leading Scottish Catholic respondents to the Reformation. Astrid Stilma reviews James VI's expositions of Revelation 20:7–10 and Kings 15:25–29 (published in 1588 and 1589, respectively), which capture James's intellectual differences between the purely poetic preoccupations of the early 1580s and his mature political thought. The works condemn Catholic Europe and laud Protestant Scotland as a new Israel, and both appear to have been polished theologically (perhaps by the Perth minister Patrick Galloway) to make them even more acceptable to the contemporary Kirk. Mark Sweetnam uses Alexander Montgomerie's religious lyrics to argue against the traditional portrayal of the poet as a staunch defender of the Counter-Reformation. Instead, on issues like salvation by works, grace, and piety, Montgomerie's works show a muted Calvinist leaning that is highly ambiguous and reflects his early upbringing. Deirdre Serjeantson suggests that while in Scotland Henry Lok (ca. 1560–ca. 1608), a messenger between the Earl of Bothwell and the English court, picked up a particularly Scottish aesthetic that he later used in his extensive religious writing and that in turn influenced the work of John Donne and George Herbert. This section concludes with David Reid's analysis of David Hume of Godscroft's six extant letters to James Law, Bishop of Orkney (written between 1608 and 1610). Reid finds that Hume wrote in a plain and direct style blending humanist and scholastic influences and that he sustained a defense of democratic “parity” among the ministry on largely political grounds.

Part 3 provides two very different examples of the phenomenon of reception. Adrienne Scullion notes that despite numerous revivals since 1948, Ane Satire has struggled to recreate its original political edge and to show off fully its literary quality as a play. Although the immediate postwar revivals and the 1969 staging in the Bute Hall at the University of Glasgow received particular acclaim, many productions have been received as little more than historical pantomime. Finally, Martin Dotterweich's discussion of Murdoch Nisbet's Lollard New Testament and its emendation in the light of successive English translations in the 1530s (notably Coverdale’s) is a clear case study of the considerable synergies between Lollard and early Protestant thought as the latter developed.

This volume makes no claims to being the final word on Scotland's reformed literary corpus, and the varied focus of the chapters reflects a field that is in considerable flux. However, its main strength is that it recognizes limited unifying features in the literature of the Scottish Reformation (the centrality of the Bible to almost all religious writing and the linkages between Anglicization and Protestantism, for example), while highlighting, and celebrating, the confessional, linguistic, and ideological ambiguities lurking within these texts.