Showing papers in "Innes Review in 1999"

Nicol Burne: 'plane disputation bayth at libertie, and in presone'

Abstract: Nicol Burne's Disputation concerning the Controversit Headdes of Religion, published in Paris in 1581, forms part of a flurry of polemical exchanges between Scottish Catholics and Protestants in the late 1570s and early 1580s.1 In some respects—and insofar as the two elements can be distinguished and separated at that period—the debate belongs to, and has been treated as part of, the history of political ideas rather than theological controversy. In the political context, the precipitating event was the belated publication, in 1579, of George Buchanan's De iure regni apud Scotos. No doubt the debate prompted by Buchanan's radical 'resistance theory' was itself much concerned with what we may call political theology; but the period also saw animated discussion of broader and more fundamental doctrinal issues. Such discussion had of course been going on throughout the years since the effective launching of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland in 1560.3 In one instance, indeed, we can point to an individual whose contributions to the debate span the earlier and later phases and touch both its wider and its more narrowly political aspects. Ninian Winzet's Flagellum Sectariorum, completed before (though published together with) his riposte to Buchanan's political dialogue, took up in a more 'professional' vein the theological issues on which he had challenged Knox and others in Scotland twenty years before.4 Yet there was

Glasgow Diocese and the claims of York

Abstract: There are no Scottish eleventh-century sources for bishops of Glasgow, which does not mean that no bishops existed, though there were certainly long vacancies of the see. York sources are more forthcoming. According to Hugh, the chanter of York, information from reliable sources (recent oral tradition) was available half a century after the event about two bishops, Bishop Michael's predecessors in the bishopric of Glasgow. These were Magsuen and John who had been consecrated by Archbishop Cynesige of York in the period 1055x1060. The schedules with their obedience to York have not survived as has that of Michael; they were later believed to have been destroyed in a fire caused by Normans, as a later York chronicler claimed.1 But, says Hugh the Chanter, 'owing to the attacks of enemies, and the desolation and barbarism of the land, that church (Glasgow) was long without a shepherd.'2 If York had been lying about this, they could have lied