ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Communities travel across widely divergent parishes to attend services, some catching ferries in parishes interspersed with lochs, others walking the short distances from the hinterland of their urban burgh. The book focuses on the experience of parochial worship, and explains points of departure the main elements of religiosity undertaken in the community. The nature of much published primary source material propagates the emphasis on the institutional political narrative of the mid-seventeenth-century Scottish Kirk, rather than the parochial religious practices of congregations. The flexibility shown by local ecclesiastical authorities actually provided the Kirk, as an institution, with considerable strength. The seminal work of David Stevenson argues for the importance of the Kirk throughout the 1640s, whilst emphasising the central role of the covenants in mid-seventeenth-century politics.
