Endorsements

Plague, war, witchcraft, invasion, rebellion: for the generation of Scottish protestants who witnessed the tumultuous period between the British civil wars and the Revolution of 1688, there was little doubt that God was angry and that the gains of the Reformation were at stake. Plagues of the heart explores the formation, practice, and performance of protestant identity amid these interlocking crises of the seventeenth century. The guiding contention of this book is that early modern Scottish piety was not confined to the rituals of sermon-going, covenant-swearing, discipline, and prayer. Instead, it was fashioned through individual and collective responses to extraordinary challenges like pestilence and conquest, as well as more predictable problems like sin and encounters with strangers. Taking the southwestern port-city of Ayr as a remarkable but revealing case study, Plagues of the Heart argues that under the stewardship of a generation of radical clergy, Scotland developed a distinct and durable "culture of covenanting." This culture was created not simply by swearing the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, but through reimagining the post-Reformation program of discipline and worship around hardline interpretations of those covenants. Using a wide range of archival material and a microhistorical approach, Plagues of the heart provides a new understanding of religion and identity not only in seventeenth-century Scotland, but in protestant communities across the early modern world grappling with a range of interrelated crises.