The Church in Gaelic Scotland before the Reformation

Abstract

Historians investigating the state of the medieval Church in Gaelic Scotland have not had their problems to seek. Scholarship has been traditionally weighted towards the early medieval period, where the search for the elusive ‘Celtic’ brand of Christianity dwarfs anything published for the period after 1100. Late medievalists have tended to contrast the Church in the Gaelic Highlands unfavourably with the ecclesiastical organization and religious sophistication of Lowland society, and some have dismissed it as a little more than a superficial and extraneous appendage grafted onto society. In one especially dismissive passage Gordon Donaldson argued: The facts provide but a slender foundation on which to build the romantic picture of a pious Catholic populace who maintained their faith uncontaminated by the reformation. The truth is that the Highlands never had adequate spiritual ministrations until the nineteenth century, when the Free Kirk took the task in hand.1 In recent years scholars have challenged the sharp dichotomy between the Highlands and Lowlands and the cultural homogeneity of the Gaidhealtachd itself, but in the ecclesiastical sphere certain distinguishing traits, chiefly around institutional provision and the sexual and religious mores of the clergy and laity, remain uncontested.2 This paper seeks to flesh out some of these issues and to examine the performance of the Church within the context of Gaelic society and wider Christendom.