This fine tribute to Michael Lynch upon his retirement from the Sir William Frazer chair in the University of Edinburgh is a significant contribution to early modern Scottish historiography generally, and especially to that aspect of it of most interest to readers of this Journal. Essays by eighteen authors treat subjects ranging from royal finance and rebellion in James iv's reign (Steve Boardman's important contribution) to the Edinburgh Surgeons' Incorporation (Helen Dingwall's masterful illumination of the subject), to burgh politics in the seventeenth century (a taste of Laura Stewart's fine book-length foray into urban history). For church historians, the contributions of Jane Dawson, Jenny Wormald and Jamie Reid-Baxter merit special note in this too-brief review, and those of David Ditchburn, Alan MacDonald, Julian Goodare and Michael Yellowlees will be of interest. Dawson uses her unmatched mastery of all things related to the Campbells of Argyll as a way into the complicated history of divorce law after the Protestant Reformation; the dramatic, sometimes violent rift between the earl and his countess provides for her a case study in competing ecclesiastical and civil jurisdictions; in women's use of the post-Reformation courts to their own advantage; and in how kin, politics and religion interacted in the creation of the 1573 parliamentary act permitting divorce on grounds of desertion. Wormald uses the Perth Articles of 1618, with their contentious requirement of kneeling for communion, to renew the contest for most clueless king of Scots, James vi or Charles i (the latter retaining his title easily). In the process, she makes the very good point that James was not so much anglicising as continuing his decades-old campaign to extend the Scottish king's sway over his own Kirk; that he made the attempt with more discretion than Charles would ever use is no surprise. Reid-Baxter's piece on Andro Boyd, the poet-bishop of Argyll, helps to explain Boyd's escape from the Presbyterian calumny heaped on so many other bishops and, by implication, illumines the pre-Caroline success of Scotland's mingled polity of presbytery and episcopacy; its long quotes and appendices initially appear burdensome, but drawn as they are from little-known manuscripts, they provide a useful service to literary scholars as well as historians. It is much more enlightening than MacDonald's argument that an old friendship between the Presbyterian Andrew Melville and archbishop Patrick Adamson underlay their decades of vituperation over church polity: the friendship is clear enough in well-known printed sources and is hardly the first to have been undone by religion. Other essays are even more disappointing. Ditchburn's introduction raises our hopes with a critique of the received version of pilgrimage in Scotland enjoying its final flourishing in James iv's reign and then declining well before the Reformation. Expecting new data showing continued popularity of pilgrimage after 1513, the reader's excitement is, alas, dashed, since the preponderance of the article deals with the fifteenth century and before, and where there is new information, it suggests the continued popularity of traditional religion generally, but not of pilgrimage per se. Yellowlees also treads turf already known in his look at the Jesuit William Crichton's 1595 map locating Catholic nobility in Scotland; Crichton, a bit of a loose cannon, got much of his data wrong and unsurprisingly failed in his efforts to secure Spanish aid for Scottish Catholics altogether too thin on the ground to make Counter-Reformation work. Finally, while Goodare cleverly dissects the 1596 Edinburgh rising and its noble/burgess/clergy vanguard, he still credits the contemporary Presbyterian radicals' view of the event, giving us a failed coup in the name of Reformed ecclesiastical polity. His own evidence instead suggests an event more anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish than Presbyterian, and more a spirited defence of beloved ousted ministers than of the form of church government that they favoured; still, the political implications of a broad-based crowd besieging the king and council in the tollbooth in the name of religious purity are clear. The quality of the essays is uneven, then; however, the best of them serve to make the volume well worth a read – and not just by Scottish historians. The view it offers of the interplay of politics, religion, urban life and culture in the Reformation and Civil Wars era make it essential to those who claim to be British historians.