Much of our understanding of how the poor were assisted in early modern Scotland has been shaped by Rosalind Mitchison's The Old Poor Law in Scotland (Edinburgh 2000). In that study, which really focused on the period 1650–1845, the old Scottish poor law (introduced by parliamentary statutes in 1574 and 1579) suffered by comparison both with the English poor law and the provision of state-sponsored social welfare that emerged in more modern times. In this well-researched book, John McCallum effectively revises such comparisons, instead examining relief for Scotland's poor in the first century after the 1560 break with Rome in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century systems of charity across Europe, and in light of Scotland's position as a relatively poor country. While Mitchison strongly criticised the lack of compulsory taxation to support the Scottish relief system, McCallum argues that the system, largely administered by parish kirk sessions, ‘was more effective, substantial, and wide-ranging than has been assumed’ (p. 1). He supports this with a deep dive into the records of twenty-five parishes, some urban and some rural (although all of them lowland), across the period. What he finds is that while particular practices could vary widely between communities, with some (for instance) favouring female over male paupers, some focusing primarily on the disabled poor and some on poor families with children, the obligation to help was nevertheless taken very seriously by ministers, elders and deacons. Just because contributions to ‘the poor's box’ in individual parishes were generally voluntary does not mean there were not strong social pressures in favour of such charity (and sometimes fines for misbehaviour were passed directly on to the poor). The payments which kirk sessions were able to make, while almost never enough for any particular impoverished person to live on, would certainly have helped. Although many of us have studied kirk sessions primarily as agents of social control, McCallum finds that in periods of crisis such as the famine of the 1620s or the wars of the 1640s and 1650s, their mission to instill ‘godly’ behaviour would break down faster than their efforts to alleviate poverty. That alone is a striking insight. In his final chapter, McCallum discusses forms of charity, many informal, that were not administered through the Kirk but which would also have had some impact, though by their nature leaving few documentary traces. The result is a more nuanced, if less insistently-argued, picture of the early modern Scottish response to poverty than that offered by Mitchison's more legislatively- and institutionally-focused study two decades ago. McCallum's book should replace Mitchison's for the period that it covers, albeit his interest in contributing to the wider discussion of poverty in early modern Europe may be undermined by his tendency to leave dialect terms such as ‘wobster’ (weaver) untranslated.