More Complex than the Textbooks

Taking their local witness in session minutes together with the material culture they have left us, we now have a Reformation more complex than the textbooks have offered, ridden with tension and contradiction, but for all that more credible than the received version and certainly more illuminating of the larger population’s multivalent perceptions and receptions of the new ideas.

Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, 404.