Scottish Studies Roundtable: Politics and Preaching in Glasgow, 1651

The Centre for Scottish Studies is pleased to announce the next and final installment of our 2015 Scottish Studies Roundtable series, "Politics and Preaching in Glasgow, 1651", presented by Alexander Campbell, a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Queen's University and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

 In 1651, Glaswegians experienced political upheaval like never before. Oliver Cromwell occupied the town with an army of religious radicals, the burgh's ministry became waylaid by partisan politics and, by year's end, the Glasgow presbytery had ruptured into competing factions.  This paper examines two remarkable manuscripts that provide unparalleled glimpses of the ways in which these disputes played out in Glasgow's pulpits.  The first is a notebook of sermons prepared and preached by Robert Baillie (1602-1662).  The second is a volume of notes composed by Baillie's son, Robert Junior (1634-1658) as he listened to sermons being preached by his father and by the other ministers in Glasgow.  Through this case study, I highlight some of the creative and unexpected ways in which the political messages of sermons were shaped  by interactions between preacher and parishioner, and amongst parishioners.  Moving beyond the rhetoric of the minister's text, the early modern sermon emerges as a key to understanding the ways in which political strife played out in a locality.

About Alexander Campbell: I am currently a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Queen's University and, for the 2015-2016 academic year, I am also a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.  I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2014 and I am currently revising it for publication as a monograph, entitled Peace and Unity in the British Civil Wars: The Mind of Robert Baillie (1602-1662). I have begun a new course of research into the ways in which archival formation and practices of life-writing came to be interrelated in the early modern period.  Alongside this broader interest in life-writing, I am also conducting research into the sermon culture of seventeenth-century Scotland.

As always, light refreshments will be provided. Please contact the Centre for Scottish Studies by email at scottish@uoguelph.ca for more details. The event is open to the public and all are welcome.

See you on the 15th!