There was very little in Reginald Pole’s previous record as a scholar, confessor, or ecclesiastical statesman to suggest that he attached great importance to the externals of traditional worship. However, in his task of restoring the Church in England to the Catholic fold, he felt constrained to use whatever methods and materials were available to his hands. Ceremonies, as Miles Huggarde rightly observed, were ‘curious toyes’, not only to the Protestants, but also to those semi-evangelical Reformers of the 1530s whose exact doctrinal’standpoints are so hard to determine. Along with the papal jurisdiction had gone the great pilgrimage shrines, not only St Thomas of Canterbury—that monument to the triumph of the sacerdotium over the regnum—but also Our Lady of Walsingham and a host of others. Down, too, had gone the religious houses, lesser and greater, with their elaborate liturgical practices, and many familiar saints’ days had disappeared from the calendar before the austere simplifications of 1552. Such changes had provoked much opposition and disquiet, but they had left intact die ceremonial core of the old faith, the Mass in all its multitude of forms, and the innumerable little sacramental and liturgical pieties which constituted the faith of ordinary people. The recent researches of Professor Scarisbrick, Dr Haigh, Dr Susan Brigden, and others have reminded us just how lively these pieties were before—and during—the Reformation, even in places heavily infiltrated by the New Learning, such as London. It was at this level that traditional religion seems to have been at its most flourishing; in the small fraternities and guilds attached to parish churches; in the ornamentation and equipment of the churches themselves; and in the provision of gifts and bequests for obits, lights, and charitable doles.

In a recent number of the English Historical Review Dr Jennifer Loach argued for a more positive view of the relationship between the government of Mary Tudor and the printing-press. Against a historical tradition which has been persistently critical of the regime’s failure to understand the importance of printing, Dr Loach has argued that Mary’s government in fact had a very real understanding of the value of printed propaganda, and took positive measures to promote abroad a favourable view of the restoration of Catholic worship in England. The key events of the reign, the Queen’s accession and marriage and the ending of the schism, were all marked by the publication abroad of pamphlets in Latin or foreign vernacular languages promoting the government’s viewpoint. The speed with which such accounts appeared suggest an official version of events, usually in Latin, was sometimes deliberately circulated to sympathetic printers to ensure wide publicity.

Such a declaration of the central role of discipline within the Reformed tradition is a commonplace to all historians of the Reformation and will be familiar to the editor of The First Book of Discipline, from which the above quotation comes.1 The head, the seventh and entitled 'Of Ecclesiastical Discipline', conformed in its procedure to the practice of estabUshed Calvinist congregations on the Continent in its austere attitude to the unrepentant sinner as in its care for the repentant individual who, on an appointed day before the whole kirk.

It might seem reasonable to assume that Alexander Myln’s Vitae episcoporum Dunkeldensium was a humanist document. He begins with a paragraph called by Hannay a dedication to Bishop Gavin Douglas and to the canons of Dunkeld who were promoted in the time of Bishop George Brown. If anyone in early sixteenth-century Scotland deserves the name humanist, Douglas is the man, and one would expect a work dedicated to him to adopt a corresponding style. The book, however, does not wholly live up to expectations. Myln was a lawyer devoted to documents, and his normal style is that of the early records which he consulted. The dedication is no more than a formal greeting to the Bishop and Myln’s other colleagues on the residentiary Dunkeld chapter.

In Scotland as elsewhere, Protestant reform began as a clerical revolt within the Established Church. Without exception, the earliest leaders of reform in Scotland were disenchanted ecclesiastics, men whose backgrounds were essentially academic and clerical, men who possessed sufficient technical training and expertise to appreciate, before the sloganizing began, the significance (if not all the implications) of Luther’s academic revolt in 1517, and the relevance of his challenging ideas on salvation and his attack on the ‘treasury of merit’: not even the saints, he believed, had sufficient merit to save themselves. Luther, after all, was an Augustinian friar, priest, university teacher (as, for that matter, were Wyclif and Hus), and doctor of theology before his break with Rome. His thinking merited scrutiny, appraisal, and debate, even if only for refutation; and if nothing else, scholastic methodology had fostered theological speculation and critical discussion within an accepted framework of debate. Besides, Erasmus’s initial reaction to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was conciliatory: he considered Luther’s beliefs would be approved by all men, apart from a few points on purgatory; and he was later to observe, in 1519, that Luther’s detractors were intent on ‘condemning passages in the writings of Luther which are deemed orthodox when they occur in the writings of Augustine and Bernard’.

With supreme self-confidence the St Andrews kirk-session declared on 31 May 1564: