Chris Langley is a historian of early modern religious identity and culture with a specific interest in post-Reformation Scotland. In Cultures of Care: Domestic Welfare, Discipline, and the Church of Scotland, c.1600–1689, he explores the role of the Church of Scotland in sustaining and supporting parishioner-initiated care networks, especially those that appeared to be on the brink of collapse. In a cradle-to-grave analysis of the structure and working mechanisms of these networks, Langley expands on his article “Lying Sick to Die: Informal Care and Authority in Scotland, ca.1600–1660” (Sixteenth Century Journal 48, no. 1 [2017]: 27–46), which was predominantly concerned with care arrangements for the mortally injured and terminally ill in seventeenth-century Scotland. Here though, in Cultures of Care, Langley takes us through the entire life cycle of noninstitutional care and support, from such diverse care as arranging a wet nurse for an orphaned infant, to purchasing food and drink for a lykewake, a post-mortem gathering of kin, neighbors, and friends to commemorate the life of a recently deceased person.

Organizing his material into six chapters with themes on parish kindness and care acts, childcare, illegitimacy, illness, disability, and death, Langley examines the ways in which church officials liaised with and supported unofficial care networks, and, in so doing, were able to “traverse both official and unofficial roles with no sense of contradiction” (157). Those same church officials were, after all, a part of the community, not separate and distinct from it, and shared social and cultural norms with parishioners. Langley notes that this situation forms a contrast with England, where, as Marjorie Keniston McIntosh argues (Poor Relief in England, 1350–1660, 2011), parish overseers took a more distant approach (35). Elders and deacons in Scotland realized they needed to interact closely with the parish population to have any role in supporting networks that were established by the parishioners themselves. It is, Langley argues, this communal bond and neighborly interaction that enabled kirk officials to operate as a safety net of support for informal community-based networks of care. As members of the community, the elders and deacons were fully aware of the existence of such networks, and, as Langley points out, their own families created support networks when their kinfolk were ill, disabled, pregnant, or dying.

Langley is also keen to emphasize that formal and informal poor relief mechanisms were not operating alone or against one another, but rather in tandem with one another and should be viewed together as active components in a “landscape of charity which included a large, and hitherto underappreciated, hinterland of informal welfare” (21). The informal care networks were largely self-help kin and family-based networks, who would approach the session for assistance only once the burden of care became unmanageable and their care arrangements were on the verge of collapse. A long-term illness for one household member placed considerable strain upon the family income, and eventually caregivers would need external support. The sessions for their part, by working alongside existing care structures and not enforcing top-down reforms upon them, enabled the kirk to simultaneously help reinforce existing community bonds, and keep an eye on domestic affairs within the parish. Kirk officials and ministers would only intervene unasked when it was felt that there was a need to avoid public scandal, for example in restricting the numbers allowed to attend a lykewake, to avoid the bawdy behavior of (often) uninvited guests, seeking free food and drink, and treating the occasion in a disrespectful manner. With Cultures of Care, Langley connects issues that many would previously have perceived as unconnected, namely social care and social discipline.

The extensive geographical range for the primary sources used in Langley's research ensures this impressive study offers a broadly representative impression of the relationship—and some problematic aspects thereof—between informal care networks and the Church of Scotland. The case studies presented come from an enormous list of eighty kirk session, twenty-five presbytery and four synod records, along with printed extracts of kirk court proceedings from another five regions. The depth of Langley's research in other primary and secondary printed sources is no less impressive too; this project has clearly been some time in the making, and the result is worth it.

However, one feels that this is just the start of an even longer journey, as there is scope for much further research to complement what Langley has already achieved here. For instance, further research could examine the relationship between informal care networks and civic authorities; after all, the kirk did not have the authority to distrain for nonpayment of debt, and an unpaid fostering payment was precisely that, a debt. And private estate accounts could reveal much about employment related care and support. Langley has opened a whole new field of discourse on social care in early modern Scotland, and for that he deserves enormous credit.