The kirk session minutes of seventeenth-century Scottish parishes offer an abundance of evidence for informal networks of kin and neighbours who provided care for the poor, aged, ill and disabled, and for orphaned or abandoned children. These domestic forms of charity accompanied the more formal relief provided by the deacons and elders of the kirk, in conjunction rather than at odds with the Reformed magistracy and ministry. The latter were often concerned with the intersection of discipline and care, ensuring that those poor persons collecting financial relief were upright in behaviour, for instance, and that the parents of base-born infants to be fostered performed public repentance for their fornication or adultery. But this should not be taken to indicate a disjunction between institutional and informal care: the elders and deacons were well aware that the aid they could offer would not meet the needs of the community without care provided by family and friends. Langley's work draws on anecdotal evidence from the mostly manuscript session minutes of dozens of parishes and some presbyteries, along with print prescriptive literature, to describe domestic forms of charity and demonstrate ‘the unseen limits of a Reformed consistory's authority and the porous boundaries between authorities and their charges’ (p. 1). He challenges the notion that authorities were anxious to intervene in domestic care arrangements, arguing that they were largely reluctant to get involved in such affairs ‘until requested or forced to do so’ (p. 12). Then, however, elders and deacons entered into ‘a symbiotic relationship with local carers’ (p. 40), well aware that, as elsewhere in Europe (including realms like England with its highly centralised and rate-based system), official poor relief was never adequate to supply the needs of all the poor and infirm.

These are arguments worth making, about an important phenomenon, but it is not clear that they require 180 pages to accomplish. The first problem with the book is that it is extremely repetitive, repeating its major themes far too frequently. The author also too often follows long and perfectly clear quotes with unnecessary re-statements in his own words (for example, p. 124). His examples of various forms of care are quite interesting, but fewer would suffice to make the point; footnote references to other cases would make it clear that his examples are representative. It is easy to imagine a volume a third shorter that would serve the cause perfectly well. A second problem is that there are no real surprises here. The session minutes bear out the abundance of research on English poverty and networks of kin and community that proved essential in filling the gaps left by official relief, generally with cooperation by authorities who must themselves have felt relieved. (The work of Hindle or McIntosh are obvious examples.Footnote ¹) Why would one not expect the same charitable impulses and similar arrangements in Scotland? The reader must also wonder why the start date is so late, since sixteenth-century session minutes reveal precisely the same sort of relationship between official and domestic care.

Matters of interpretation are sometimes troubling. The author suggests rather more kindness than may have been the case. He asserts, for instance, that judgements about relief were not about inclusion and exclusion (p. 37), but of course they were, on grounds both of godly behaviour and social reputation, those of ill repute being denied aid. There is no effort here to address the horrific practice of banishing relapsed sexual offenders, together with their often newborn offspring, to the not-so-tender mercies of the road. This is a missed opportunity for the author, since many of such people in fact wound up back in the parish being cared for by relatives – a fine example of the culture of care in conflict with the authorities. The chapter on childcare skims over cases of apparent neglect and trauma: an infant apparently undernourished by a wetnurse for nearly two years before being removed from her care (p. 41), a foster boy ‘extruded’ from the household and then forcibly returned to an obviously unwilling fosterer (p. 47) and separation of siblings in care (p. 49). The chapter on illegitimacy begs many questions, like why in a case of a father demanding infanticide it was the mother who was imprisoned because the session had ‘run out of options’ (p. 97). This chapter repeatedly asserts minimal session involvement in foster care arrangements for illegitimate children, but nowhere addresses the probability that elders on their regular visits to families in their assigned quarters did in fact investigate carers. It is best not to argue from silence. Finally, in the chapter on disability, the author constantly refers to mental illness as ‘learning disability’. Session minutes use different words for those who had difficulty learning (‘simple’ or ‘idiot’) and those who were out of touch with reality (‘distracted’ or ‘frantic’). They recognised that these are not the same sort of problem at all. There are enough details in some descriptions to make it likely that a person had the coprolalia typical of what would now be called Tourette's syndrome (pp. 144–5 – a woman excused for openly ‘banning and cursing’ an elder, ‘finding her to be a fool lyk bodie’); or clinical depression, perhaps bi-polar disorder (p. 145, the minister Thomas Wood, with a ‘sadde affliction’ and in need of care because of scandalous public behaviour). The author makes the important point that contemporaries saw such people as still possibly of the elect and meriting care; he just needs to take care himself not to confuse his readers by eliding mental illness with a neurodevelopmental disorder, and so making his seventeenth-century subjects simpler than they were.

Despite these issues, however, this volume offers a wealth of examples of ordinary people in seventeenth-century Scotland applying neighbourly kindness to those in greatest need, from foundlings to the dying, within a system that could not otherwise begin to meet that need. Cultures of care is a worthy subject.