Appearing in the year marking 450 years since the Scottish Reformation Parliament, the publication of Reforming the Scottish Parish is very welcome. There has undoubtedly been a gap in historiography to date, in that what has been available are accounts old and new of what led up to the tumultuous high political events of 1560–61, plenty also on the subsequent shifts and manœuvrings on church polity, studies of the course of the Reformation in some significant burghs and, through the research of Margo Todd and others, assessment of the cultural shifts engendered by the Scottish Reformation. However, in contrast to the broad approaches undertaken to assess the English Reformation, we have had little to go on to understand the course of Reformation across the board in local congregations and communities. This new work focused on Fife offers an impressive engagement with that dimension, and not only in respect of the initial years around 1560 but through the second half of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Dr McCallum's work, first prepared as doctoral research while he was himself based in Fife, very usefully takes this region as its particular focus. The surviving evidence has certainly been studied to good effect, and a case can be made for Fife being relatively typical in at least the Lowland Scotland of the day. The thesis is that instead of trying to argue for the Reformation being ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ in its impact, it matters patiently to explore the story of how reformed ministry, Word, sacraments and discipline became embedded. What the Fife evidence demonstrates is that the policy events of 1560 and subsequent years allowed the beginning of change but that change, all told, was a ‘slow and necessarily incremental affair’. Merely for the provision of ministers or the functioning of Kirk Sessions, one has to take the study on to the 1590s and probably at least another 30 or 40 years beyond that; and then there are also less well-known stories to be analysed, of what these ministers taught and how these Kirk Sessions were disciplining.

The attractions of such detailed local study are obvious. Some generalisations in vogue must of necessity be demolished, with a sharper attention paid to chronology. Ministers, at first very scarce on the ground, were when appointed clearly well qualified, most of them not only university educated but tested beyond that. But their shortage in the early decades after 1560 had a major knock-on effect. The minister would be a key player in the exercise of discipline. Without a minister, there was frequently no preaching but only the reading of scripture, the reading of prayers and the singing of Psalms, and how did this affect the process of establishing Reformed church life? What was the significance of teaching resources other than the preached word in the consolidation of Protestant life and thought? On the one hand the Roman Catholic establishment all but disappeared, by and large; but the filling out of an alternative rhythm of life for church and society was gradual. There are grounds to suppose that this in itself deserves consideration for a country where Protestant faith came to endure without either much violence or widespread opposition.