Scholars who work in the field of pre-Reformation Scottish history have good reason to welcome this book and the thorough scrutiny that its author brings to a recalcitrant body of extant source materials. MacDonald's aim is ostensibly simple, if ambitious: to reconstruct the pre-Reformation administrative history of the sprawling episcopal see of Argyll. Despite the efforts of several generations of scholarship on the subject of the medieval church, he claims, historians still know relatively little about how the church and its most important agents, parish priests, worked on the ground in Scotland between ca. 1000 and 1560. About Argyll and its place within the cultural, ecclesiastical, and confessional worlds of the western Gàidhealtachd, he reminds readers, they know even less. MacDonald therefore sets out to address these historiographical lacunae, by demonstrating both how closely the church of western Scotland was in touch with its European leaders and how the medieval bishops of Argyll coped with the challenges of governing one of the most remote and poorest of the Roman church's provinces.

The aim of the book may be simple, but it presents no easy task for MacDonald. He is more than ready to acknowledge (and to praise) the groundwork that previous generations of scholars laid in sketching out the early history of the see, in identifying the men who held high office there (bishops, archdeacons, and deans), and in analyzing relations between Argyll and the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Scotland and beyond. But he is quite correct to claim that the absence (or loss) of such fundamental record materials as episcopal registers and monastic cartularies has prevented historians from offering anything more than an impression of the day-to-day activities through which, over the course of some three centuries, clerics ministered to the faithful. Fortunately, there does survive an enormous body of correspondence and other deeds generated by the work of the papal chancery and penitentiary, preserved in the Vatican archives. Applying a prosopographical approach, MacDonald extracts from this mass of sources a coherent account of the early history of the medieval see, the administrative and fiscal problems that confronted bishops and parish priests, and the strategies that they adopted to overcome the challenges that attended the planting of a highly structured ecclesiastical hierarchy in the heart of a Gaelic-speaking world characterized by complex ties of lordship and kindred. Not least among the author's many accomplishments here is the provision of a painstakingly reconstructed parochial fasti for the diocese of Argyll from earliest times to 1560, which he lays out in a long appendix. This alone makes the volume worth its (alas, dauntingly high) purchase price.

In his effort to write a new, comprehensive history of the see of Argyll—the first of its kind of any of the medieval Scottish bishoprics—MacDonald offers a fresh analysis of several long-held beliefs about the nature of Highland society and its interactions with the Scottish court. In the first two chapters, he posits a new chronology for the foundation of the cathedral church at Lismore, a careful study of the unusual structure of its chapter, a review of the difficulties that the first bishops encountered in trying to fund their see, and an assessment of why they eventually abandoned the original foundation at Lismore for the richer and more populous environs of mid-Argyll and Cowal. The following four chapters, which comprise the bulk of the book and its richest findings, focus on the diocesan clergy between the mid-thirteenth and the later sixteenth centuries. Unlike many other historians, MacDonald argues that the medieval church and its agents commanded deep respect from lay people and clerics of all ranks. This fundamental loyalty was crucial in enabling bishops from backgrounds as diverse as Clement of Dunblane (who stepped in ca. 1247 during a contested vacancy) and George Lauder (appointed by papal provision at the request of King James I, and “easily the most controversial” [74] of the medieval bishops) to establish meaningful links with the local aristocracy and to work with, rather than despite, them to promote the financial interests and the spiritual aims of the church in the region. Parish livings and other benefices were much prized by locals and aggressively pursued by them, and for much of the late medieval period, local clerics included a very significant contingent of Gaelic speakers, able and willing to minister to their charges even in the most remote corners of the see. In the fifteenth century, Lowlanders began to secure parish livings in increasing numbers; nonetheless, priests continued to play a central role in promoting contacts between the western reaches of the kingdom and the wider European church. According to MacDonald, moreover, these men proved instrumental in implementing the designs of Scotland's political hierarchy following the forfeiture of Clann Dòmhnaill in the late 1490s. Wisely, the author does not attempt to dismiss the arguments of previous scholars that clerical celibacy remained a problem in the region well into the Reformation period, nor does he deny the enduring hold in Argyll of clerical concubinage and the establishment of ecclesiastical lineages that so often accompanied it. Yet he offers a series of compelling reasons for treating these and other weaknesses of the late medieval church, including pluralism, nonresidency, and poor education, as symptomatic of the European experience more generally. Adopting this perspective, he suggests, permits historians to appreciate that despite its position at the periphery of western Christendom, Argyll was no less “mainstream” than any other region in pre-Reformation Europe.

MacDonald is occasionally compelled to repeat a bit more forcefully than he needs to his argument that the church and the clergy of later medieval Argyll “was [sic] in a far healthier condition than previous generations of scholars were willing to admit” (269), and it has to be said that the prosopographical approach, with its emphasis on individuals and the often minor roles that they played on the international stage, is not for the faint of heart. The book had its origins in a doctoral thesis completed at the University of Glasgow in 2009, and this explains, though does not always excuse, the author's resort to textual notes that are occasionally wordy and pedantic. But these are minor flaws, and MacDonald more than makes up for them by including in the book a series of very helpful tables and no fewer than six maps.