The National Covenant in Scotland, a multi-contributor volume edited by Chris R. Langley, is the first collection to focus on Covenanter identity since the 1990s and the first ever collection to focus on Covenanter identity solely from the Scottish perspective, within the Scottish context. While not an exclusively Scottish issue or movement, the National Covenant and the Covenanters arguably had their most significant and lasting impact within the Scottish kingdom. However, there is a trend among many scholars of the period to discuss the ramifications of the Covenant within a principally English or broader pan-British and Irish context. The National Covenant in Scotland is a valuable contribution given that it successfully brings Scotland to the forefront, for its own sake, to elucidate how complicated and mutable early modern Scottish experiences and understandings of the Covenanting era were. Even the word Covenanter itself defies easy definition.
The volume is divided into three sections. The first group of essays centers on “Swearing and Subscribing.” Nathan C. J. Hood's chapter addresses the emotional presentation and reception of the Covenant at swearing ceremonies, focusing on swearing as a ritualized and corporate conversion experience, as well as the role of godly sorrow and feeling God's mercy in early modern Scottish conversion beliefs. The next chapter, contributed by Paul Goatman and Andrew Lind, highlights Glasgow's reception of the Covenant in 1638, looking to the preceding three decades to gain a better understanding of the burgh's complex and varied response to the Covenant, as well as the relationship between social change and revolution in seventeenth-century Scotland. In his chapter, Russell Newton fashions a more detailed picture of the Aberdeen Doctors, challenging the long-held consensus of only six doctors, adding William Guild to the number, and providing a broader chronological framework from which to gauge the Doctors and their complicated, shifting, and far from united response to the National Covenant. In chapter 4, Jamie McDougall examines the emergence of divergent opinions from 1638 to 1651, arguing that Covenanting ideas were highly fluid and that the language of the Covenant itself was vague enough to produce multiple interpretations.
The volume's second section pivots to discussions of “Identity and Self Fashioning.” Chris Langley's chapter seeks to understand how Covenanter leaders understood their immediate predecessors, namely John Knox, in their efforts to fashion usable pasts for themselves and their various agendas. In chapter 6, Louise Yeoman uses the case of Margaret Mitchelson to examine divine possession as an outlet for the gendered performance of covenanted piety. Meanwhile, Andrew Lind analyzes the experiences and rhetoric of the parish clergy who sided with the king and resisted the National Covenant. Salvatore Cipriano's chapter investigates how the universities became an ideological battleground following the Engagement and during the Protester-Resolutioner schism that followed, illuminating how the disputes within these academic institutions foregrounded the Covenanting movement's deterioration.
The essays in the final section focus on “Remembering.” In chapter 9, Neil McIntyre provides the first attempt to examine how the events of 1648–51 were understood by Restoration-era Scots. Meanwhile, Allan Kennedy details how the specter of the Covenanting revolution influenced political developments during the Restoration, particularly within the realms of church-state relations, government militarism, and the rise of impersonal parliamentary government. Bringing the volume to a close, Alasdair Raffe addresses the difficulties surrounding the very definition of the term Covenanter, questioning the term's validity for any group following the Restoration of the monarchy.
The National Covenant in Scotland will be most readily accessible to scholars and graduate students of seventeenth-century Scotland, as it assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge. However, scholars of the early modern British Isles and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms would do well to add it to their reading lists. The collection could use more diversity among the contributors, a shortcoming the editor acknowledges in the introduction. That said, by addressing the National Covenant within a solely Scottish context, The National Covenant in Scotland effectively rebukes previous scholarship that treated Scotland as a sidebar when discussing one of the most significant events in the kingdom's own early modern history. In so doing, Langley and his contributors have paved the way for future scholars to continue to unearth the uniquely Scottish experiences of the seventeenth century.
