Speaking at the tricentenary of the National Covenant's first subscription, Hugh Watt described how the Covenanters’ legacy had come to ‘carry more fringes and tassels than a mid-Victorian mantelpiece’. The Covenanters and their impact on Scottish (and wider British) history remains contested: they are reviled by those who decry their fanaticism and lauded by those who promote them as presbyterian martyrs. Studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the Covenanters’ protest as part of a longer lineage of Protestant activism. To Robert Wodrow, the year 1638 heralded a new ‘work of reformation’ that confronted the ‘encroachments’ and political intrigue of the Stuart monarchs. In this scheme, the National Covenant heralded a ‘Second Reformation’ and a legitimate successor to the sixteenth-century work of John Knox. So strong was this impulse that James King Hewson made use of the label of ‘covenanter’ to describe individuals who were active long before 1638. This perspective continued to reflect divisions within the Church of Scotland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writers attacked historical actors who did not maintain established orthodoxy as backsliders who did not deserve the name Covenanter. While historians have tried to sidestep the religious issues that surround the history of the Covenants and the Covenanters, ‘the intellectual and emotional material’ present in the study of these topics ‘may still be flammable’. Scholars should proceed with caution. Ian Cowan's lament that ‘the covenanting movement is not an easy one to assess’ remains as true today as it was in 1968.

The word Covenanter defies precise definition. Beyond identifying an individual who signed or swore allegiance to the National Covenant of 1638 or the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643/4, the term does not reflect the range of opinion or the complexity of the changing historical context of the seventeenth century. Historians have deployed various devices, from splitting subscribers into conservative, moderate and radical wings to considering prominent individuals alone, as means through which we might understand the diversity of the Covenanting movement. Moreover, those who subscribed the document were sometimes the dominant authority and at other times nonconformists. Elizabeth Hyman stressed that using the term ‘Covenanter’ when discussing any context after 1660 is largely anachronistic but that a ‘generally acceptable’ alternative was still wanting.