ABSTRACT
In 1692, ‘Jacob Curate’ attacked the literary conventions of the erstwhile Kirk party in his critique of The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence: ‘when they speak of Christ, they represent him as a Gallant, Courting, and kissing, by their Fulsome, Amorous Discourses on the mysterious Parables of the Canticles … they have quite debased Divinity, and debauched the Morals of the People’.2 Curate’s analysis, loaded with the ecumenical hostilities of the 1690s, set the pattern for the subsequent reception of early modern Scottish theology. From the late seventeenth century to the present day, as critics have moved from satirizing the Kirk’s licentiousness to complaining of its censoriousness, the theological literature of early modern Scotland has continued to fascinate and repel its readers. Modern critical orthodoxy has followed Curate’s example in dismissing the theological literature of the period as almost uniformly unworthy of serious scholarly attention, imagining those interested in Calvinism as a vocal but unrepresentative minority; historical scholars, meanwhile, increasingly assert that Calvinism was a true ‘religion of the people’, and that even the bishops of the church to which ‘Jacob Curate’ apparently adhered shared the Presbyterians’ basic Reformed consensus.3 Early modern Scottish theology was much more universally Calvinist than has been imagined. Nevertheless, since the seventeenth century, the Scottish literary canon has been forged in a climate deliberately opposed to the theological ideas – especially the Calvinist ideas – that repeatedly appear at its heart. As Sarah Dunnigan has noted, while ‘Scottish literary history … still ignores, or misunderstands, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, arguments for ‘reforging the canon’ must
continue to be a canonical plea.4 This is nowhere more necessary than in the scholarly reception of the literary cultures of the Scottish reformation.5
