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Emphasis on the Word therefore had implications for forms of public worship, and controversy over matters of faith frequently centred around these visible expressions of religious belief: these questions were of much more widespread and immediate significance to ordinary Christians. They also drove the roots of these theological controversies very deeply into European society. What happened at each moment of each occasion of religious worship in every corner of Europe could provide the focus for a debate which was literally more important than life or death. More than Luther, Calvin and his followers tended towards an austere view of the role of ritual and image in communicating religious truth, placing great emphasis on scripture, expounded by ministers who were expected to be effective preachers.

There were differences of degree and opinion on these matters, which divided not only Protestant from Catholic, but Protestant reformers from one another. Predestination was urged with caution, and although religious practices were tested more stringently against scripture this did not lead to the abandonment of all traditional practices. Importantly, it was possible to defend ‘harmless’ practices which were not specified in scripture, but which were not counter to it. In particular a residual role was reserved for edification – sensitizing the believer to the saving message – which allowed for the preservation of parts of the medieval tradition.

Similarly, respectable reformed opinion was not anti-clerical. Most reformers believed that scripture was not self-explanatory, and needed to be expounded by those with a gift for such exposition. There were good reasons to be careful about pushing the argument against an intercessory priesthood too far – it might entail standing idly by while misinformed brethren with a poor understanding of God’s Word pursued their own damnation. Equally, there were concrete fears about the consequences for this world of allowing misinformed brethren to follow what they mistakenly understood to be their conscience. The Münster Anabaptists who had held property in common or the German peasants who had engaged in social protest during the 1520s were remembered as the exemplars of the dangers of ungoverned spiritual life. The pursuit of reformation often entailed a reduction in the space allowed to clerical authority, therefore, but almost always stopped short of allowing individual believers complete freedom to define their own relationship with God.17 Priest became minister and teacher; the individual believer was by no means left isolated.

At the centre of the Reformation message was the view that individuals were saved (justified) by faith, not works; a greater emphasis on scripture as a guide to the Christian life; and a pared-down sacramental and ceremonial worship focused more clearly on the Word. These issues, although fundamental, were not without ambiguities – over the doctrine of predestination and its implications, over which elements of the received tradition were acceptable, and over which particular practices edified, or were superstitious, idolatrous and distracting. The Reformation was not a completed event but a process and the Protestant faiths were recovered rather than founded: Reformation politics were not driven by a desire to establish a new church but the urgent need to purify the old one. This might mean stripping out of the liturgy, ritual and physical fabric of the church those corruptions which were counter to the true scriptural religion, or removing the vestiges of the papal corruption of the constitution of the church which had allowed errors to flourish. But in Scotland, as everywhere else, the nature of the task and its limits were contested.

Although there was no unambiguous agreement about what a restored church would look like, it did seem clear to many Protestants that the principal enemy of that restoration was the Bishop of Rome. The favoured term of abuse for unwelcome practices was therefore ‘popery’: a term which gave a comforting polemical