Death,Life and Religious Change in Scottish Towns

Mairi Cowan

Manchester University Press

Mairi Cowan tackles head-on the issues of religious life and personal faith amongst ordinary Scots in what has been caricatured traditionally as an era of torpor and decadence before the spiritual regeneration of the Reformation. A work of excellent and accessible scholarship, it presents a compelling account of the bonds that tied the living and the dead and explores the personal expression of religious belief by individual townsfolk and groups of kin and friends. In its survey of two centuries of religious behaviour amongst Scots, it offers a real national perspective on this critical aspect of everyday life and delivers a vision of dynamism, vigour and engagement in religious expression that is at odds with traditional narratives of the state of the pre-Reformation Church in Scotland.