Studies of the Scottish Reformation have long considered the national and international character of the movement alone, attributing the success of religious change to the failings of a corrupt institution or the overawing zeal of Protestant nobles and their English allies. Timothy Slonosky’s important study strives to correct this, convincingly asserting that the actions of the laity, and the burghs in which they lived, were as important to the success of this religious movement as the military victory of the Lords of the Congregation (p. 7). Slonosky argues that the explicit cooperation of town councils responsible for controlling critical elements of ‘civic religion’ was essential in ensuring lasting religious reform in Scotland. The religious beliefs and practices of Scotland’s townspeople, and the structures of the burghs themselves, then, were key to the success of the Scottish Reformation.

Though local studies, undertaken by those such as Michael Lynch on Edinburgh and Mary Verschuur on Perth, have provided in-depth analyses of the experiences of individual communities in the lead-up to religious change, no work has attempted such a wide-ranging comparative survey as Slonosky to ‘meet [the laity] where they lived’, problematising top-down narratives of reform and interrogating the local character, contributions to and variations of, this movement (p. 5). The breadth of this archival study should not be underestimated: the use of under-accessed and largely unpublished local records is a particular strength of this work and an important introduction to the urban history of sixteenth-century Scotland for unfamiliar scholars. This research situates these religious changes deftly within the broader European context of Protestant reform, with comparisons to attempted Calvinist revolutions in France and the Low Countries in the same decade throughout.

The Scottish Reformation, Slonosky attests, was more successful than its continental counterparts because it was able to ensure the peaceful cooperation of urban populations. Since burgh governments controlled critical aspects of ‘civic religion’, their participation in the movement was essential in ensuring that the reforms introduced at the national level were broadly supported across the social strata. Drawing on works by scholars of early modern Europe such as André Vauchez, Slonosky argues that these actions – to promote and maintain religious devotion in ways that benefitted inhabitants through divine favour – were particularly strong in Scotland. This was, he shows, due to the single parish structure of each burgh and the ‘distance from royal and ecclesiastical hierarchies’ which meant that Scottish town councils had a particularly extensive degree of control over religious affairs (p. 50). This also meant that each community developed in a unique way as a result of the conditions and personalities of individual burghs and their governments. Largely dictated by available urban records, this work covers the period between 1520 and 1565, by which date Slonosky suggests the ‘initial structure, if not necessarily the spirit’ of the Protestant Church was established in the examined burghs (p. 7).

Centred on the towns of Dundee, Haddington and Stirling, these communities act as representative case studies for the varying patterns of urban Reformation identified in mid sixteenth-century Scotland. The first two chapters, exploring the economic and governmental make-up of the three communities studied, are a helpful overview of these under-assessed burghs for unfamiliar readers, setting out the social and political structures of these sixteenth-century towns. Chapter ii analyses the nature of governance in the three burghs, providing an in-depth survey of the individuals and families who exerted influence through council membership. This was not, however, a simple power oligarchy, but a relationship of consent through which a ‘meaningful degree of broader participation in and support for municipal government’ ensured that communal harmony was at the forefront of burgh politics (p. 30). Slonosky demonstrates that generally those who were part of the urban magistracy, and thus responsible for civic religion before the Reformation, often maintained a role in governance even after religious change. Detailed discussion of the influence of the assize in burgh courts as a symbol of urban authority and solidarity in this chapter is particularly strong. Part ii, consisting of three chronological chapters, details a wide-ranging survey of the events of the decades leading to Reformation, to suggest that these circumstances meant townspeople were more susceptible to religious reform. Tracking the spread of Protestant ideas circulating from the 1520s, Slonosky suggests that trade connections with continental Europe, the circulation of reforming ideas through plays and poetry and the experience of plague and war all contributed to a landscape of uncertainty by the late 1550s.

These three communities, Slonosky argues, were burghs with ‘very different levels of support’ for Protestantism, but each came to support the reformation of religion over the course of the period of study. In Part iii, three main categories of reformation are identified: ‘Reformation from within’, ‘Reformation from without’ and ‘Late Reformation from within’. This analysis is a high-point of the study and convincingly places emphasis on ‘decisive’ urban choice in the process of national Reformation, despite varying attitudes to religious change and the individual contexts of government, economic pressures and external influences of each burgh (p. 191). Whether initially an active embrace or a later acquiescence, Slonosky demonstrates that even communities that were forcibly reformed by the outside forces of the Lords of the Congregation, such as Stirling, St Andrews and Edinburgh, continued to build and maintain the civic church independently, even when the threat of physical violence was more remote. Burghs in the third category, including Haddington and Peebles, chose to implement religious reform on their own initiative in the aftermath of the Reformation Parliament of 1560, when they were able to control both the speed and character this change took in their own communities. This book provides an important antidote to the common tendency to view the Reformation Parliament as producing a nation of reformed Scots overnight and appropriately tracks the circumstances of uncertainty, economic disaster and successive conflict that contributed to creating fertile ground in the localities for religious and civic reform. Emphasis, then, is placed back on those who ultimately ensured the success of Protestantism ‘on the ground’ (p. 248). This movement could be both attractive and empowering to local governments, providing the means and structure for councils and townspeople alike to gain increased control over their communities, placating God in the aftermath of decades of perceived divinely-provoked disaster at the same time.

The underpinning rationale for selecting Dundee, Haddington and Stirling as representations of wider samples of Scottish towns that fit similar patterns is surprisingly not explicitly set out until chapter viii, ‘Reformation: 1558–1560’. The main motivation for selecting these three towns is their ‘complete but largely understudied’ records and ‘different levels of support for Protestantism’ in earlier sections (p. 7). This is of course true, but considering the wide-ranging intended audience for this study, it seems unusual that this helpful contextualisation – that these burghs should be considered representative of what Slonosky identifies as ‘three distinct paths followed by Scottish towns’ – is not identified earlier in the work, nor are the other burghs that fit within these categories until this point (p. 195). Though this chapter is particularly strong, it is also demonstrative of the uneven source base of the study, with over half of the analysis of the chapter dedicated to Dundee’s experience of Reformation in the crucial years prior to August 1560, in comparison to around a single page on Haddington. This focus on Dundee is mirrored across the study, often to the detriment of Stirling, whose records are admittedly acknowledged as ‘intermittent’ in comparison.

This is compounded by the organisation of the text. Though the impulse to separate by burgh is understandable, especially in such a broad study, the use of this structure is at times problematic to the overall analysis of the work and makes the varying source base much more obvious. Chapters that do not separate analysis of each locality by subheading are generally much stronger (especially chapters iii and iv, exploring the civic church and its urban clergy), with much clearer conclusions and connections between towns sustained throughout the text. Allan White’s important work on the experience of civic reformation in the burgh of Aberdeen, much of which forms Slonosky’s fourth category of ‘Reluctant Reformation’, is also mistakenly attributed to Nicholas White in the text (p. 209).

Overall, Slonosky’s important study is a welcome addition to studies of urban history in sixteenth-century Scotland, offering a convincing assessment of the broader dynamics of the Scottish Reformation and the role of local communities in the lasting success of the movement. The spotlight on these three burghs and their exceptional records is well overdue and will no doubt encourage scholars to turn to these archives for further investigation. This book is, of course, essentially a Lowland study: one may hope that this work, grounded on serious archival research, will open the possibility of similar inquiry for other urban communities further away from the administrative centre.