Plagues of the Heart

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, these events were unmistakable signs of God's anger and threats to the gains of the Reformation. 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 extended beyond the rituals of sermon-going, covenant-swearing, discipline, and prayer. Instead, it was fashioned through individual and collective responses to extraordinary challenges such as pestilence and conquest, alongside more predictable problems like sin and encounters with strangers. Using the southwestern port-city of Ayr as a compelling case study, this book 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 strict interpretations of those covenants.

Drawing on a wide range of archival material and employing 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.