This is the second volume of essays to have been produced by the team behind the AHRC-funded project, The Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland. While the first (Saints’ Cults in the Celtic World, also published by Boydell & Brewer in 2009) took a pan-British approach, this volume focuses explicitly on Scotland, while still retaining the chronological breadth which characterised the first volume. The collection contains a range of essays, which use a wide variety of sources, showing that saints’ cults can be found everywhere, regardless of the genre of material. Particular focus is given to Marian devotion, which is the primary focus of three of the articles (Hall, Innes and Fitch), and appears in others (Hammond, Ditchburn).

Both Thomas Owen Clancy's essay and David Ditchburn's make significant historiographical contributions to the study of ‘Scottish’ saints’ cults in their respective periods: the early and later Middle Ages. In light of these chronological bookends, it is perhaps a shame that there is no similar essay for the central Middle Ages, although Matthew Hammond's ambitious and well argued essay in the volume – on royal and aristocratic devotion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – goes some of the way towards this. Ditchburn's essay takes on the McRoberts thesis and firmly situates later medieval Scottish devotional practices in the context of cults which had sprung up in particular places elsewhere but taken on importance throughout Western Christendom. This is a firecracker of an article, much to be recommended, and its themes are taken on in some of the more focused chapters in the volume, most notably those by Mark Hall, Sím Innes and Audrey-Beth Fitch, all of which are interested in how Marian devotion was worked out in a Scottish context in the later Middle Ages. Alan Macquarrie's article on the Breviarium Aberdonense, in part a compendium of ‘Scottish saints’ (Propria Sanctorum), makes for even better reading in light of these essays.

Questions about the process of formal canonisation are also raised by some of the chapters. In Helen Birkett's lively and engaging analysis of the Vita Waldevi she argues that this text was produced as part of a never fully realised bid to obtain Waltheof of Melrose's official canonisation. Birkett also makes the interesting point that it was still local devotion that mattered for a saint to be a saint: in this late twelfth-century context, papal canonisation only had to be sought, not necessarily successfully so. Steve Boardman also zones in on the problems contemporaries and later writers had with the cult which sprung up around David, Duke of Rothesay, after his murder in 1402. Boardman ends with some very interesting questions about why devotion to secular ‘martyrs’ was not as common a phenomenon in Scotland as in contemporary England, where it could act as a cathartic strategy to bring about political unity after massive political fissure.

In short, this is a diverse collection of essays, with some really stand-out pieces. Collectively, they concentrate on the complicated relationship between more regional and universal saints, and show us yet again the wide and diverse functions particular saints’ cults, no matter how long-lived, could serve. It would have been extremely interesting to know what the editors thought the contribution of this volume was to wider questions, such as the changing and expanding nature of Marian devotion and, say, the difference between earlier and later patterns of devotion, and how focusing in on a national experience makes sense in the context of European-wide cults. The two historiographical and methodological essays by Ditchburn and Clancy raise many questions about the typicality of Scotland in their respective periods, and show the reader the different challenges presented by studying saints’ cults in the early vis-à-vis the later Middle Ages. A longer introduction could not only have raised some of these questions more fully but also shown more explicitly how the volume as a whole contributes to these wider debates. This is, however, a volume of very high overall quality, containing extremely interesting and diverse studies.