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This book is about one of the most extraordinary national transformations in European history. During 1559 and 1560, the kingdom of Scotland experienced what was arguably the first modern revolution. The book aims to present a new synthesis of ideas on the origins of the Scottish Reformation, building on the recent scholarship but also suggesting some new directions. It asks not only why the Scottish Reformation took place, but why this Reformation took place, rather than one of the many other 'Reformations' - and, indeed, counter-Reformations - that seemed possible in sixteenth-century Scotland. It tries to reconnect religion and politics, and to trace their interaction. In particular, it emphasises how acts or threats of violence drove political processes and shaped religious culture. Violence isolated moderates and aggravated division. Sometimes it discredited those who applied it. Equally often, it managed to destroy its targets, and those who refused to use violence were outmanoeuvred. As such this is a tale of few villains and fewer heroes. The book also tries to place the Scottish Reformation on the wider stage of the European Reformation. Despite the nationalism of the traditional accounts, and of much Scottish history in general, the Reformation's natural stage was all Europe. The Scottish Reformation can be illuminated by international comparisons, and it was itself an international phenomenon. Religious developments in England and France, in particular, were a decisive influence on Scottish events.

Since 1945, the man with the toothbrush mustache has dominated our moral imaginations. Christianity's moral authority had been decaying for centuries, but what made the decline terminal was World War II: the modern age's keenest moral test, and a test the Christian churches failed dismally. Most Christians did not actually approve of cruelty, warmongering, and systematic murder; they simply cared more about maintaining social order, about defending Christianity against mockers, profaners, and blasphemers (including Jews), and about reasserting Christian sexual and family morals. For the Christians who formed the backbone of the American civil rights movement, it became a point of principle to play down their religious identity and forge broad alliances that paid no heed to faith.

The Seekers, a supposed sect which flourished in late 1640s England, have generally been neglected by historians, with the exception of Quaker historiography, in which the Seekers play a pivotal but supporting role. This article argues that the Seeker phenomenon is worth attending to in its own right. Perhaps deriving from spiritualist, radical and Dutch Collegiant roots, it also represents the logical outcome of English Baptists and other radicals trying and failing to find ecclesiological certainty, and being driven to the conclusion that no true church exists or (for some Seekers) can exist. The article concludes by examining how the Seeker life was lived, whether as austere, apophatic withdrawal; a veering into libertinism; or by forming provisional communities, communities which did, in some cases, serve as a gateway to Quakerism.

That means, of course, that these histories have an element of autobiography. So it has always been: historical study of any kind has always seesawed between autobiography, in which insight smothers accuracy, and palaeontology, where the trade is reversed. Yet of all the modern \"turns\" which continue to make our subject so dizzying, perhaps none is more persistent and problematic than the \"fictive turn.\" We must admit it: The sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction in relation to the past is dead. The recreative power of immersive fictional worlds, and their ability to enhance our understanding, have proved too great to resist. Such fictional worlds have always shaped popular understandings of the past; the scholars' hope to maintain their purity was probably always doomed, even before the financial lures of collaboration became too strong for universities to resist. We should not pretend that this has been without cost. But the liberation it has brought the legitimacy of (disciplined!) imaginative reconstruction, or even of simple construction has been profound, and it has opened up new intellectual worlds. We all know, of course, that Machiavelli and Sun Tzu never met, but having watched, inhabited, participated in the Beijing-Lima version of their debate, who could deny that we understand both of them better, and that we have made them both understand themselves better? The cost has been a certain amount of silliness: exercises such as frivolous imagined retrospectives written from nonexistent futures. But the potential prizes remain worth it. Not least, it remains possible that the blurring with fiction will help to foster styles of academic writing that are genuinely readable, in which scholars pursue literary fluency and stylistic ease, rather than shun them as markers of intellectual debasement. There is, admittedly, no sign of this yet.

The history of a sect can scarcely avoid dancing with sectarianism. Even if the sect has vanished from the earth, it is difficult not to become either a defender or a critic, and when there are controversies still living, history cannot help but feed them and feed off them. The only certain way to avoid this is to retreat inside the sect entirely, becoming part of a world where it is the only and obvious subject of interest. And so the histories of religious minorities easily become self-referential ghettoes, where formidable expertise is built up while basic questions about how the subject is framed are left unasked.