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This discusses the political history of the religious settlements between 1558 and the end of the century. It contrasts England and Scotland, roughly characterized by having reformation from above and from below, but also emphasizes shared concerns and attitudes. The problems of reform in Ireland are treated separately: here the danger of assuming inevitable failure for Protestantism is stressed.

For several hundred years, Scots law has held to the proposition that a promise is legally binding without the need for acceptance. Stair discussed promise and the rationale behind the claim of promise as being legally binding in his Institutions. And although later writers lacked the clarity of Stair’s vision and capacity of analysis, the law remained unchanged until the Requirements of Writing Act in 1995. This chapter considers Stair’s treatment of promise against the background of the canon law and jus commune, and actual practice in Scotland. It probes into the state of Scots law in the years between the Scottish Reformation in 1159–60 and the appearance of Stair’s Institutions in 1681. It also investigates the influence of the pre-Reformation canon law on the creation of the Scottish law of obligations. In addition, the chapter also addresses the questions of Stair’s use of the term ‘pollicitation’ which bedevilled the entire area of this law.

The conclusion brings together the main contributions of Sacred Signs. By defining liturgical interpretation and showing its centrality to Scottish religious culture, it opens up a neglected area of religious culture and suggests why it has been neglected. The study of liturgical interpretation in Scotland shows that there was more continuity than has been allowed over the religious revolution of 1559–60. It argues that the way we speak about the Scottish Reformation is wrong and needs to be changed to include Catholic as well as Protestant Reform movements. It also looks forward to ways that the distinctive method developed in this book could be applied to other regions and periods.

The Introduction presents the shape and method of the book and gives reasons for the chronological framework chosen. It presents ‘liturgical interpretation’ as genre which was important in medieval and early modern intellectual life but has been neglected in modern scholarship. Terms are defined and it is explained how an emphasis on the interpretation of public worship holds together the wide variety of sources and methods used in this investigation. The Introduction also sites the book in the ongoing debate about the historiography of the Scottish Reformation and the historiographical trend towards the recovery of rite and symbol. It is suggested how the research behind the book points towards a radically new understanding of the Scottish Reformation as a Catholic and Protestant phenomenon and lays the foundation for a revisionist view of the period in Scotland which may be compared to that associated with Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars in England.

The poem, catechisms and other official texts studied in this chapter show that liturgical interpretation had a significant place in both rival versions of reformatio ecclesiae, Catholic and Protestant. It is argued that this was partly due to Wishart and Knox pushing worship to the centre of controversy from the late 1540s and partly to its centrality to the Catholic Reform movements which formed most of the leaders on both sides. A new spirit associated with the Council of Trent led to a decline in interest in Catholic liturgical interpretation at the end of the century. The Reformed version of liturgical interpretation was distinguished not by method but by the worship it explained, a Reformed liturgy determined by the exclusive scriptural principle of worship. The chapter also confirms the importance of the diocese of Aberdeen in the history of liturgical interpretation in Scotland.

This chapter examines the place of Catholic and Reformed liturgical interpretation in the different stages of Reformation controversy and again shows the importance of the ‘Aberdeen Liturgists’. It shows how Catholic controversialists such as Quintin Kennedy and Ninian Winzet used liturgical interpretation to defend traditional liturgy, while Protestants attacked traditional liturgical interpretation in ‘anti-commentaries’ but still used the method on their own worship. From around 1580 liturgical interpretation was largely absent in controversial literature. The chapter concludes by defining the nature of Reformed liturgical interpretation using Ane Breif Gathering of the Halie Signes (1565) and Robert Bruce’s 1590 sermons on the Lord’s Supper. It is shown to be distinctive in its simplicity and close to the humanist, catechetical version of liturgical interpretation characteristic of Catholic Reform.

This chapter shifts the focus of attention from England to Scotland, and onto the variously complex, subtle and strident engagements with social and religious issues undertaken in Sir David Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. It suggests how the playwright and his actors’ conversation with their audiences sought to engage them intellectually and affectively with the matter of religious and social reform in the early years of Scottish reformation ferment, and devised a new form of drama in the process.