Abstract
This paper applies the two research questions posed by this strand of the Insular Christianity Project to western Gaelic Scotland: the dioceses of Argyll and the Isles from the thirteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, with the emphasis on the decades on either side of the official inauguration of the Scottish Reformation in 1560. Did this Gaelic speech community avow a Christianity rendered distinctive in any shape or form by its language? Did it possess or provide a usable Christian past? The two questions can be read as one, positing the issue of difference with reference to separate timeframes. Consequential subsidiary questions rapidly identify themselves. If distinctiveness there was, did it have a basis in substance or perception? Did it reside in the consciousness of its own community, or of those outside it? This last prompts the sounding of a cautionary alarm bell, lest these questions be fruits either of an archipelagic cultural mindset within which the Celts play their accustomed role of aberrant foils to Anglophone orthodoxy; or of occasional hints within Celtic scholarship that Christianity was little more than a veneer tacked on to Celtic society, and irrelevant to its deepest and truest instincts.1 Yet, to speak plainly, why should language alone have been sufficient to render Gaelic Scotland different from any other part of either a pre-Reformation Western Christendom which embraced a multitude of tongues, or a post-Reformation Europe which elevated the vernacular into a tenet of faith?
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Notes
John MacInnes, ‘The Panegyric Code in Gaelic Poetry and Its Historical Background’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 50 (1976–8), p. 457. See in general
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W. J. Watson, Scottish Verse from the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh, 1937), pp. 90–1. A near-contemporary mock-elegy castigates its subject on precisely these grounds (pp. 134–9).
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MacGregor, M. (2014). Gaelic Christianity? The Church in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland before and after the Reformation. In: hAnnracháin, T.Ó., Armstrong, R. (eds) Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137306357_5
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