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Laura Stewart's Rethinking the Scottish Revolution frequently noted the important role played by women in shaping, driving, and sustaining the covenanting revolution of 1638–1651, and established new ground for examining female involvement in its political, ideological, and cultural legacies. Indeed, following the 1660 Restoration, Scottish politicians charged with managing public order would bemoan the dominant influence of 'fanatick wives' and 'silly women' over those around them and lament their leadership in public petitions, rabblings, and other forms of protest. With few notable exceptions, however, scholarship concentrating on this later period has often paid only limited attention to female nonconformity; noting women's presence as tolerated wives or spiritual correspondents of male leaders without appreciation of their independent participation and leadership. Purposefully written out of – or sanctified – by many of the canonic sources relied upon by historians of the era and left unnamed in edited primary sources, secondary literature frequently depicts female activists as detached from male counterparts yet united by the prescribed piety and gendered expectations of past and present scholars alike. This article will use new archival evidence and revisit edited sources to rediscover the authoritative voices of female covenanters between 1637 and 1715. Moving discussion beyond 'agency' as a satisfactory explanation for female participation in conventicles and other expressions of dissent, it will conclude that these women's cultural authority must be appreciated and integrated within future scholarship if we are to fully appreciate the true legacies of the covenanting revolution as a major, paradigmatic moment in Scottish History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1652 Ayr became a garrison town for the Cromwellian army. The English occupation brought challenges for Ayr's kirk session, ranging from the misbehaviour of local residents to the presence of religiously heterodox soldiers. This article surveys social and spiritual responses to the Cromwellian invasion, asking what these responses reveal about the on-going meanings of and commitments to the covenants. It is argued that the occupation brought to the fore both the fragility and flexibility of the community's covenanter identity, which endured long after the covenanting revolution had ostensibly failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a remarkable series of communal confessions that occurred in Ayr in response to the arrival of the plague in 1647, asking what this previously overlooked episode reveals about the local identities forged amid the national turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century. When the disease struck the bustling port on the south-west coast, Ayr had already cemented a reputation for political and religious radicalism, and the town was engaged in on-going defence of the covenants of 1638 and 1643. The minister at the time, William Adair, was a committed presbyterian in the early days of his forty-four-year career in the parish. Faced with the plague and its potential for devastation, Adair led his congregation in a week-long series of public, collective confessions, the details of which were meticulously recorded in the kirk session minutes. Though covenanter identity is often framed as a political and national endeavour, this article argues that the events in Ayr constitute an extraordinary yet widely relevant example of covenanter 'self-fashioning' as a fundamentally local, communal process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the initial opposition to the National Covenant from the masters of the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen in 1638. It has generally been assumed that opposition to the Covenant among the intellectual elite was confined to the Aberdeen Doctors. The resistance in universities, however, was much more extensive. Only Edinburgh University, located in Scotland's revolutionary centre, supported the covenanting movement from the outset. In elucidating the widespread nature of opposition in universities, this article draws on a corpus of previously overlooked manuscript and printed sources, especially pertaining to the covenanter's debates with intransigent academics at St Andrews and Glasgow, before setting the Aberdeen Doctor's resistance within the context of this wider academic hostility to the covenanting movement over the course of 1638. Though the universitie's resistance was by no means coordinated, it, nevertheless, represented a pressing concern as the covenanters pursued a national movement. In examining these early intellectual arguments against the Covenant, this article illuminates university master's stark differences with the covenanters over the nature of kingly authority, church government and religious ceremony. Because the universities trained Scotland's ministry and magistracy, these intellectual disagreements had pressing consequences. Thus, far from a minor encumbrance to the covenanting movement in 1638 that resulted in the subscriptions of the masters of Glasgow and St Andrews and the purge of the Aberdeen Doctors, the universitie's resistance to the Covenant proved foundational to the covenanter's subsequent aggressive supervision of higher education within the construction of their fledgling confessional state in the 1640s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The covenanters are often considered to have been unrelenting opponents of episcopacy. In the Glasgow Assembly of 1638, when nearly all covenanters voted to 'remove and abjure' episcopacy in the kirk, the Glaswegian minister Robert Baillie was the sole named dissenter. Baillie's subsequent conformity to the covenanting regime after 1638 and his ultimate acceptance of the restored episcopate after 1661 have led historians to claim that he was pliantly obeying those in power. In order to offer an alternative explanation, this article explores the contours of Baillie's writings on episcopacy in the periods 1637-9 and 1658-62. His views were informed by hatred of the Laudian episcopate and his belief that scripture described a lawful form of episcopacy similar to the superintendents of the post-reformation kirk. Whilst Baillie protested against the restored episcopate in 1661, the reasons for his subsequent submission suggest one explanation as to why many presbyterian ministers acquiesced in Charles II's Erastian kirk settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the religious dimension to popular protest in the early eighteenth century, highlighting in particular the continued influence of what has been called the Covenanting tradition – the defence of Presbyterian church government, popular sovereignty and the resistance of Anglican imperialism – in southwest and west central Scotland. Religiously inspired ideas of equality and economic equity in God's world, combined with the desire to resist the encroachment of Anglican hierarchy, drove ordinary Presbyterians to rebel. There is evidence to suggest that the reaction of some protesters to socio-economic conditions was coloured by their theological worldview. The phenomenon at work in southwest Scotland might best be described as ‘Presbyterian moral economy’. The paper suggests that lowland Presbyterian culture coloured popular protest to a degree not hitherto recognised. Presbyterian moral economy was a robust and continuous – but unduly neglected – strand in the history of Scottish radicalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]