Lay Religiosity, Piety, and Devotion in Scotland c.1300 to c.1450

Abstract

In its first half, this paper presents an overview of recent research on the popular experience of religion in pre-Reformation Scotland and focuses especially on that experience in the century-and-a-half after 1300. In the second part, it explores in detail evidence for lay patronage, new patterns and forms of religious endowment, commemoration of the dead, and expansion of church buildings. It argues that far from being a fallow period between the evangelical enthusiasm of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the intense expressions of popular piety evident in the immediate pre-Reformation period, it was a time of dynamic change and vigorous popular engagement with the new forms of religious expression that were then current in Europe.