Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland: The Emotional Worlds of James Melville, 1556–1614 3031157362, 9783031157363

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Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland The Emotional Worlds of James Melville, 1556–1614

John McCallum

Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland

John McCallum

Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland The Emotional Worlds of James Melville, 1556–1614

John McCallum Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-15736-3 ISBN 978-3-031-15737-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

It transpires that writing a shorter book does not necessarily reduce the significance of debts accrued in the process. I’d firstly like to express my gratitude to Sam Stocker and the team at Palgrave for being amenable to my suggestion that this subject would lend itself to expression in the intermediate length which the Pivot series so valuably facilitates, and for making the process such a smooth one. There are two dominating intellectual and personal debts to acknowledge, and appropriately enough one of these relates to James Melville as an individual and the other to the topic of emotions. I first discussed Melville with Jamie Reid-Baxter in (I think) 2006, since when he has been unfailingly generous in providing access to drafts and transcriptions (including some which enabled my archival trips to be far more efficient than they might have been), not to mention ideas, encouragement, and extremely helpful comments on draft material. These have made a difference which is not adequately captured by the citations of his published work in what follows. Lizbeth Powell is the reason I took an interest in emotions history in the first place, and I’m immensely grateful to her for not only tolerating but encouraging my encroachment onto her patch, for suggestions and comments on drafts, and as always for the friendship. Steven Reid provided extremely useful discussion and comments on draft material, for which I’m also very grateful. Anonymous readers for Palgrave provided very useful suggestions and observations on the material. Valuable discussion and words of wisdom and encouragement in this area have also come along the v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

way from Jane Dawson, Helen Gair, Kevin Gould, Chris Langley, Roger Mason, Ashley Thompson, and I’m grateful to Hannah Dennett for her contribution in bibliographical scoping as part of an MA research internship. In the autumn term of 2021, a particular table of students in the final year module Living and Dying in Reformation Britain proved themselves admirably tolerant of extended reading and discussion of extracts from Melville’s writing, and I have nostalgic memories of those discussions which helped to sustain energy and morale in the writing process. I’m grateful to audiences at conferences held by the Universities of Aarhus, Cambridge, and the Scottish Church History Society, and especially the Scottish History seminar at the University of Edinburgh, for their questions and suggestions on various parts of this work. Archivists and colleagues at the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections were extremely helpful and enabled the archival elements of research to be completed very effectively and happily, pandemic notwithstanding. I also benefit hugely from the support and ‘exceiding guid fallowschipe’ of all my colleagues in the brilliant History team at Nottingham Trent University. All of these people have contributed to any qualities the book has; any and all of its shortcomings are without exception my own responsibility. Closer to home, love and thanks to Hannah, as always, and a fond final mention for Polecat, who is sitting on my lap as I type this, as she has been for the best part of the writing process.

Contents

1

Introduction Overview Historiography Sources and Methodology Biographical and Historical Survey

1 1 4 11 17

2

Religious Experiences Introduction The Personal Spiritual Journey Religious Politics and Emotion Conclusion

25 25 26 31 41

3

Social Relationships Introduction Family Friendship Flock Conclusion

43 43 44 54 60 65

4

Understandings of Emotion Introduction Melville’s Emotional Range Melville’s Emotional Language Conclusion

67 67 68 75 82

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CONTENTS

Conclusion

Bibliography Index

85 97 107

Abbreviations

Adv. Ms. DSL JMAD NLS UECRC

Advocates Manuscripts. Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk, last accessed 28 July 2022). R. Pitcairn (ed.), The Autobiography and Diary of Mr James Melvill, MDLVI-MDCX (Edinburgh, 1842). National Library of Scotland. University of Edinburgh, Centre for Research Collections.

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Introduction

Abstract This chapter introduces the aims and scope of the study. This includes discussion of emotions historiography and, in particular, the current state of thinking on the emotions of early modern British Protestants, and sets out the rationale for a study focused on an individual. The sources and methods for the study are discussed in detail, especially the Autobiography of James Melville. Melville himself is then introduced via a biographical review with particular reference to the wider events which shaped his experiences. Keywords James Melville · Emotions · Reformation · Sources · life-writing

Overview This study offers the first exploration of the subject of emotion in early modern Scotland from the perspective of focused analysis of an individual person. Through detailed analysis of emotion in the life and writings of James Melville (1556–1614), it sets out to establish an understanding of early modern Scottish emotional experiences and expression, and to open up possibilities for further research in this area.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0_1

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It is obvious even to the casual observer that the subject of emotion has captured immense historiographical attention recently, and especially in the last decade. Research has expanded almost exponentially, and early modern History has been well-represented in this growth, meaning that scholars are developing far richer and more nuanced understandings of the role of emotion in pre-modern societies.1 It is striking that early modern Scotland has remained relatively untouched by these developments, especially for the period prior to the eighteenth century, and indeed the more so the earlier the period in question.2 Where there has been some discussion of emotion prior to the eighteenth century, it has focused on specific strands of seventeenth-century covenanting thought and affective piety, which are deeply important but leave unaddressed a wider range of emotional experiences, concerns, and language.3 This study utilises James Melville as a case study in the intensive analysis of emotion, to provide detailed and contextual exploration of emotion in contrast to more general approaches, and allowing the construction of a holistic portrait of an emotional world. Melville has been selected for 1 For crucial surveys of this development see J. Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2012); B. Rosenwein and R. Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge, 2018); for the boom in early modern emotions history key edited collections include S. Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2017); S. Broomhall (ed.), Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (London, 2015); S. Broomhall (ed.), Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2015); G. Tarantino and C. Zika (eds), Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (Abingdon, 2019). 2 See in particular the work of Katie Barclay, for example K. Barclay, ‘Love, care and the illegitimate child in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (2015), 105–25; K. Barclay, ‘Intimacy, community and power: bedding rituals in eighteenth-century Scotland’ in K. Barclay and M. Bailey (eds), Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, State and Church (Basingstoke, 2017); K. Barclay, ‘Marginal Households and their Emotions: The “Kept Mistress” in Enlightenment Edinburgh’, in Broomhall (ed.), Spaces for Feeling; K. Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford, 2021); see also J. McEwan, ‘“At my mother’s house”: Community and household spaces in early eighteenth-century Scottish infanticide narratives’, in Broomhall (ed.), Spaces for Feeling. 3 L. Yeoman, ‘Heart-Work: Emotion, Empowerment and Authority in Covenanting

Times’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1991); L. Yeoman, ‘Archie’s Invisible Worlds Discovered: Spirituality, Madness and Johnston of Wariston’s family’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 26 (1997), 156–86; D. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford, 2000); D. Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self in Early Modern Scotland (Farnham, 2010) (primarily covering 1660–1730).

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several reasons: firstly his voluminous Autobiography, a standard source for the ecclesiastical history of the period, provides a neglected opportunity, alongside his other writings, to explore his emotional experiences and understandings.4 This opportunity is also one of the earliest available for Scotland, and provides a rare example of extended life-writing covering the sixteenth century, and in terms of its religious framework takes us closer to the Reformation rather than the covenanting movement. No historical individual was ‘typical’, and Melville’s specific perspective on church politics informs his writing.5 However, this presents an opportunity to explore the relationship between public affairs and emotion. His writing is impressively broad in its range of subject matter and personal experience. It provides evidence that early modern Protestants did not lead lives lacking in emotional interest, a fact which historians are beginning to appreciate in general terms, although not yet so explicitly in the case of Scotland.6 More importantly and specifically however, Melville provides a chance to identify key emotional experiences and frameworks for the sixteenth-century Scottish Protestant, especially beyond the personal spiritual narrative, and to assess how emotions were understood and utilised, and their role in public life and personal relationships, including at an earlier point than was previously possible.

4 R. Pitcairn (ed.), The Autobiography and Diary of Mr James Melvill, MDLVI-

MDCX (Edinburgh, 1842) (JMAD hereafter). See below, ‘Sources and Methodology’ for discussion of the text and its use. 5 For a biographical introduction to Melville see J. Kirk, ‘Melville, James (1556–1614), Church of Scotland Minister and Diarist’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); and for discussion of the Autobiography’s portrayal of and relationship with his more famous uncle, see J. McCallum, ‘“Sone and Servant”: Andrew Melville and His Nephew, James (1556–1614)’, in R. Mason and S. Reid (eds), Andrew Melville (1545– 1622): Writings, Reception and Reputation (Farnham, 2014). On the church politics and Melville’s involvement as well as the role played by the Autobiography as primary evidence, see above all A.R. Macdonald, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625: Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy (Aldershot, 1998), esp. 171–2; S. King, ‘“Your Best and Maist Faithfull Subjects”: Andrew and James Melville as James VI and I’s “Loyal Opposition”’, Renaissance and Reformation, 24 (2000), 17–30. 6 A. Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013); A. Ryrie and T. Schwanda, ‘Introduction’, in A. Ryrie and T. Schwanda (eds), Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke, 2016), 1–2; A. Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford, 2015).

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Historiography Individual feelings and emotional states have of course always been present as factors or elements in conventional historical writing, but the recent transformative scholarship on the history of emotions has provided enormous sophistication and complexity, and enabled emotion to become the direct focus of study.7 Emotion can also no longer be seen as an additional ingredient or an afterthought in historical study, or as the introduction to one collection puts it, ‘no understanding of historical cultures can be convincing unless it is grounded in the inner experiences of which those cultures consisted’.8 Among the lessons to emerge from the recent growth in the volume and sophistication of emotions history is the value of looking not necessarily for ‘real’ or ‘true’ emotion in a simplistic way, but to explore how emotions were understood and used in a given historical setting (including through language), not least because emotions are not so much something that we neutrally ‘have’, as something that we ‘do’ (or perhaps ‘perform’).9 This is not to say that we cannot access ‘real’ emotion, but that the experience of emotion is intimately bound up with how it is expressed.10 Equally, emotions are understood as historically and culturally specific, as ‘practices that

7 This is not the place for a full account of this vast scholarship: see Plamper, History of Emotions, 40–74, 251–96; and for the genre-defining studies on the key concepts of emotional communities, emotives and emotional regimes, and emotional control, B. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (New York, 2006); W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001); P. and C. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 813–36. The most useful recent concise synthesis of these approaches is Rosenwein and Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions?, 29–45; see also for a more over-arching survey of the field R. Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester, 2018). 8 Ryrie and Schwanda, ‘Introduction’, 7. 9 Plamper, History of Emotions, 269; Rosenwein and Cristiani, What Is the History of

Emotions?, 45–9, 123; K. Barclay, ‘Performance and Performativity’ in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, 15. 10 B. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (2016), 4– 6; A. Lynch and S. Broomhall, ‘Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700: Conversations Across Methodologies’, in S. Broomhall and A. Lynch (eds), The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700 (Abingdon, 2020), 5.

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change over time’.11 Therefore to understand emotion in a specific historical setting such as sixteenth-century Scotland, we need to think not in terms of simply uncovering ‘how people felt’, but also how they understood, experienced, and performed emotion, and the specific role that emotion played in their work, social relationships, and perceptions. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that different communities (even closely linked geographically and chronologically) could develop very different emotional norms and standards of expression.12 Moreover, the notion of change over time in emotions involving a linear or straightforward process of growing emotional control and restraint alongside the arrival of modernity has been convincingly critiqued.13 It therefore follows that there is considerable value, over and above the significant inherent interest for national historiographies or the historiography of individual topics, in mapping detailed understandings of emotion and its expression in distinct national, chronological, and cultural settings, such as sixteenth-century Scottish Protestantism. Happily, what might once have been the main objection to such a study has been seriously undermined, at least for early modern Protestantism, in general, if not yet for Scotland in particular. The stereotype of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants—especially Calvinists and puritans—as lacking in emotion, or emotional depth or colour, has been most profoundly challenged by Alec Ryrie’s work.14 This revision is not necessarily complete: as Rosenwein put it recently, ‘the characterization of

11 S. Broomhall, ‘Introduction’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, xxxvi. It is

not possible here to rehearse the overarching debate between universalism and constructivism in understanding the fundamental nature of emotion, but following most historical studies in comparable settings (including texts which disagree on other questions) this study assumes that there are very strong historically and culturally contingent elements in the experience and perception of emotion. For a thorough survey of the debate, see Plamper, History of Emotion; also for example Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 2–3; R. Boddice, A History of Feelings (London, 2019), 11–2. 12 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, esp. 47–51, 60, 65, 185–7, 199, 210, 218–21. 13 B. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’, American Historical Review,

107 (2002), 821–45, at 824–8, 834–7, 845. 14 Ryrie, Being Protestant, esp. 3–4, 17–26; A. Ryrie, ‘Protestant Theology’ in S. Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions; Ryrie and Schwanda, ‘Introduction’, 1.

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Protestantism as “unemotional” is slowly being revised’.15 There may also be some lasting stereotypes about an unfeeling Scottish Calvinist psyche which still hold some cultural weight, and this study serves to confirm their obsolescence, although its aims are both wider and deeper than this point.16 It is also striking that much of the emphasis in the recovery of the depth of Protestant or Calvinist emotion has been on the personal spiritual journey—emotional rollercoaster even—of the depths of despair at sin, joy in godly affections, and the heartfelt or introspective nature of affective piety.17 This was evidently of vital importance, but as wider early modern studies have emphasised the significance of family, household, and friendship (among other features) in understanding early modern emotion, we urgently need to think about the emotional dynamics of early modern Scottish Protestants in a more rounded manner as well.18 The foundational text for the emergence of a historiography of the Reformation and emotions was Susan Karant-Nunn’s The Reformation of Feeling, which opened up the subject by exploring German sermons from a range of confessional perspectives. It also paved the way for the shift from a simplistic binary or spectrum of ‘emotion versus little or no emotion’, to a more complex typology where Protestantism is certainly not less emotional overall, and emotion is reconfigured rather than downgraded or disowned.19 The impression of Calvinism which emerges is still comparatively bleak at times, with the dynamic of sin and guilt dominant, and among Reformed preachers Calvin himself, as is almost

15 B. Rosenwein, ‘Periodization? An Answer from the History of Emotions’, in Broomhall and Lynch (eds), Routledge History of Emotions, 26; see also Ryrie and Schwanda, ‘Introduction’, 7. 16 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 17. 17 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 27–95; Yeoman, ‘Heart-Work’, viii–x; Mullan, Scottish

Puritanism, 10, 100–1. 18 See for example Broomhall (ed.), Spaces For Feeling; S. Broomhall (ed.), Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke, 2008); K. Barclay, K. Reynolds, C. Rawnsley (eds), Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe (Basingstoke, 2016); N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001). 19 S. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2010), 5, 11.

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apologetically noted, was ‘more dour than most’.20 Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, drawing on a wider range of theological, pastoral, and personal sources, testifies to the emotional depth and vigour of British Protestant experience collectively, focusing on a ‘broad-based’ culture rather than treating England or Scotland, or other delineations, separately.21 The invisibility of Scottish experiences in current historiography is revealingly highlighted by the summary of Ryrie’s findings as pertaining to the ‘English Reform’ in one of the main surveys of pre-modern European emotions.22 This work has greatly enriched and deepened our awareness of the potential role of emotion in early modern Protestantism, while leaving a need for more detailed and contextual studies of individuals, of Scottish Protestantism specifically, and of the whole range of emotional experience including but not limited to personal faith and spiritual development.23 The emphasis on the personal spiritual journey is also present in the earliest work to have implications for Scottish emotion before the long eighteenth century. Louise Yeoman’s 1991 doctoral thesis on ‘heartwork’ in covenanting spirituality identified a deep affective piety at the centre of the covenanter experience. It showed the inner force of feeling which literally empowered covenanting as a movement. More recent scholarship has moved away from the opposition between intellect and emotion that is sometimes suggested in the thesis, and Yeoman’s intent was more to explain the nature and appeal of covenanting than to explore emotion as its own category of analysis, but it substantially demonstrates the emotional weight of the seventeenth-century covenanting experience, which was in part an inheritance from an earlier generation of Scottish Protestants which included Melville himself and Robert Bruce.24 David

20 Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 128, 131; see also S. Karant-Nunn, ‘The Reformations’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, 282–3. 21 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 4–9, 15–95; see also D. Bagchi, ‘The Scripture Moveth us in Sundry Places’: Framing Biblical Emotions in the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies’, in R. Meek and E. Sullivan (eds), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester, 2015). 22 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 251. 23 See also for example Ryrie and Schwanda, ‘Introduction’, 12. 24 Yeoman, ‘Heart-Work’, esp. viii, ix, 133–4, 275–7; Ryrie, ‘Protestant Theology’,

287.

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Mullan’s subsequent work on the theology and culture of Scottish Puritanism has also been vital in emphasising the strand of ‘emotional piety’ common to many Protestants.25 This element in seventeenth-century piety is now well-understood, albeit via scholarship which pre-dated the development of emotions history as a discipline, and again there is substantial scope to broaden the thematic focus beyond this strand in the study of the later period too.26 The aim of this study, however, is naturally to assess Melville in his own context rather than as a precursor to or influence on later expressions of affective piety. There are also signs of growing sensitivity to emotion more generally in Scottish Reformation history, as seen for example in the more rounded and human portrait of John Knox recently provided by Jane Dawson, and in the experiential aspects of Margo Todd’s analysis of Protestant culture and especially worship.27 The presence and potential significance of emotion in early modern Scotland is thus emerging, although it is striking that as a subject

25 Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 8, 9, 52, 288; see also Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self , ch. 5; D. MacKinnon, ‘She Suffered for Christ Jesus’ Sake: The Scottish Covenanters’ Emotional Strategies to Combat Religious Persecution (1685–1714)’, in Tarantino and Zika (eds), Feeling Exclusion. 26 See also W.J. op t’Hof, ‘Puritan Emotions in Seventeenth Century Dutch Piety’, in Ryrie and Schwanda (eds), Puritanism and Emotion, 220, 226–7, 232–3 for evidence of Dutch pietist interest in Scottish covenanter writings with emotional significance, and for affective piety in Scottish metrical psalmody see N. Hood, ‘Metrical Psalm-Singing and Emotion in Scottish Protestant Affective Piety, 1560–1650’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 23 (2021), 151–69. A recent chapter by Hood also points towards more nuanced analysis of this strand of seventeenth-century Reformed piety by highlighting how challenges to the older stereotypes can lead to a neglect of the subject of emotional restraint and moderation: N. Hood, ‘“Wings of the soul”: Moderating Emotion in the Preaching of Hugh Binning (1627–53)’ in C.R. Langley, C.E. McMillan, and R. Newton (eds), The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland (Woodbridge, 2021), 208–9. 27 J. Dawson, John Knox (New Haven, 2015), esp. 34, 64–8, 83, 127, 131, 263; M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, 2002), 48– 56, 94–103. See also J. Dawson, ‘Covenanting in Sixteenth Century Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 99, suppl. (2020), 336–48 at 339, 343, for mentions of the presence of emotion in some of the sixteenth-century antecedents of seventeenth-century covenanting practice; and for intriguing insight into the under-appreciated element of emotion and gesture at a key event in the covenanting movement, see C. R. Langley, ‘Deportment, Emotion and Moderation at the Glasgow Assembly, 1638’, Historical Research, 93 (2020), 466–82.

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in its own right, it has yet to make an impact on overarching assessments of early modern Scotland even including the post-1600 period.28 This study argues that, building on these initial hints and the growing recognition that the overarching model of Protestant piety in the period had important emotional components, there remains much to be done in exploring the specific contours of contemporary Protestant emotional expression. Furthermore, there is also a need to explore not just the expression of piety but also more nuanced and fundamental questions about the range and nature of emotions, how emotion operated, and how it was conceptualised, utilised, and located. It is proposed that close reading of a single individual’s writing and especially life-writing can help to provide this, going beyond broad patterns in spirituality to explore a whole emotional landscape, and to open up possibilities for further work to establish more comprehensive and societal interpretations of early modern Scottish emotion. Crucially, it also aims to include the spiritual journey and affective piety as one part of a more holistic analysis of emotion as it related to other key areas, including church politics and social relationships and experiences of various kinds. As the author of a key primary source for contemporary church politics, Melville has naturally been discussed in early modern Scottish historiography, albeit often in the shadow of his uncle Andrew, the famous church and university reformer, or in the context of their relationship and the construction of Andrew’s reputation.29 Although avowedly an ‘intellectual biography’ rather than an emotional study, a recent study of Robert Baillie offers a parallel example whereby an individual is known much less well than their words are known as source material: ‘Baillie, the man, has largely been forgotten, whilst Baillie’s words continue to be remembered for their brilliant portrayal of the British Civil Wars’.30 Something fairly similar could be said of Melville and Jacobean religious politics. Because his Autobiography is at times a wonderfully rich narrative, and touches on interesting aspects of contemporary society, he has also been cited in passing in studies of religious life, and of various wider themes such as

28 See for example most recently L. Stewart and J. Nugent, Union and Revolution: Scotland and Beyond, 1625–1745 (Edinburgh, 2020). 29 King, ‘ “Your Best and Maist Faithfull Subjects”’; McCallum, ‘“Sone and Servant”’. 30 A. Campbell, The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion

and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars (Woodbridge, 2017), 2, 19.

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school and university education, music, and even the history of sport.31 Louise Yeoman has discussed his theological approach to grace and his role as a precursor to later covenanting spirituality especially through his poetry but also with reference to his Autobiography, and although not focused on emotion as a subject, this includes brief references to passages featuring emotional language.32 Passages where Melville’s words relate to emotion are also mentioned or quoted in passing in some other works, but this study assumes that the subject merits detailed close reading of an individual in order to develop a more fine-grained, nuanced, and grounded analysis of emotion in this particular historical setting.33 Melville is also increasingly well appreciated in literary studies, with his poetry starting to be more directly examined, especially by Jamie ReidBaxter, and by Sarah Ross especially in its relationship with Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross’s poetry.34 He is therefore far from an unknown

31 See for example Ryrie, Being Protestant, 161, 463; Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 191–3; J. Dawson, ‘“Hamely with God”: A Scottish View on Domestic Devotion’, in A. Ryrie and J. Martin (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2012); M. Ritchie, ‘‘Dour-Mongers All?’ The Experience of Worship in the Early Reformed Kirk, 1559–1617’ (unpublished University of Edinburgh PhD Thesis, 2017), 203–20; J. Durkan, rev. and ed. J. Reid-Baxter, Scottish Schools and Schoolmasters, 1560–1633 (Woodbridge, 2013), 79–84; S. Reid, Humanism and Calvinism: Andrew Melville and the Universities of Scotland, 1560–1625 (Farnham, 2011), 39, 50; T. Duguid, Metrical Psalmody in Print and Practice: English ‘Singing Psalms’ and Scottish ‘Psalm Buiks’, c. 1547–1640 (Abingdon, 2016), 80, 208–9, 213–9; O. Geddes, A Swing Through Time: Golf in Scotland, 1457–1744 (Edinburgh, 2007), 23–7. 32 L. Yeoman, ‘James Melville and the Covenant of Grace’, in S. Mapstone (ed.), Older Scots Literature (Edinburgh, 2005), esp. 575–6. 33 Hood, ‘Metrical Psalm-Singing’, 154, 158; Yeoman, ‘Heart-Work’, 154; Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 9, 62, 69, 148n, Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; E. Ewan, ‘The Early Modern Family’, in T. Devine and J. Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford, 2010), 253. 34 J. Reid-Baxter, ‘James Melville and the “Releife of the Longing Soule”: A Scottish Presbyterian Song of Songs?’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 41 (2016), 211–30; J. Reid-Baxter, ‘Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross: New Light from Fife’, Innes Review, 68 (2017), 38–77; S. Ross. ‘Peripatetic Poems: Sites of Production and Routes of Exchange in Elizabeth Melville’s Scotland’, Women’s Writing, 26 (2019), 53–70 at 57–8; S. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2015), 26–62; S. Mapstone, ‘James Melville’s Revisions to A Spirituall Propine and A Morning Vision’, in D. Parkinson (ed.), James VI and I, Literature and Scotland: Tides of Change (Leuven, 2013); see also J. Reid-Baxter, ‘Posthumous Preaching: James Melville’s Ghostly Advice in Ane Dialogue (1619), with an Edition from the Manuscript’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 43 (2017), 70–101, which explores Melville’s posthumous appearance in a literary

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figure, and especially noteworthy to date for scholars of church politics and Scottish literature. However, this study proposes that his potential to serve as a sustained case study in the historical analysis of emotion is entirely untapped, and highly valuable.

Sources and Methodology The central source for this study is Melville’s life-writing. His extensive Autobiography is sometimes referred to as his ‘Diary’, although it was completed later in life rather than recording events on a rolling basis as they occurred, and so this study uses the former title (while acknowledging that overly categorical definition of pre-modern life-writing genres is problematic).35 It is written in the style of a continuous narrative of Melville’s life and times. Running to approximately 300,000 words, it remained unpublished until the nineteenth century, with the standard edition published in 1842.36 The original manuscript copy of the main body of the Autobiography, in Melville’s own hand, survives in the National Library of Scotland. This neat copy, with comparatively few crossings out or evidence of drafting and alteration (other than numerous subsequent marginal additions), has been utilised to assess any potential evidence from the handwriting and layout, and especially to consider the

dialogue. Further evidence of Melville’s interest to scholars of literature includes a recent edition, D. Atkinson (ed.), The Works of James Melville (New York, 2019). 35 Recent scholarship suggests a need to avoid imagining sharp distinctions between these two, and between other life-writing genres in this period: A. Stewart, The Oxford History of Life Writing, Volume 2: Early Modern (Oxford, 2018), 5–6; A. Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), 13–4; and for a similar point across an even broader chronological span see A. Smyth, ‘Introduction: The range, limits, and potentials of the form’ in A. Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge, 2016), 5–7. Like other early modern ‘autobiographies’, a variety of material is present within the text including church documents, letters and petitions, and poetry: A. Cambers, ‘Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 796–825 at 82l; Campbell, Life and Works of Robert Baillie, 199. 36 JMAD. This is the most widely cited and accessible edition of the text. It had

been preceded by an 1829 edition of the main body of the Autobiography (but not the ‘Continuation’, or True Narratioune), which is less widely used and less user-friendly, although matching in contents: The Diary of Mr James Melvill, 1556–1601 (Edinburgh, 1829). The estimated word count is based on typical word-count per page, checked against the rough indication provided by the text version of an online PDF copy.

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nature of the marginal additions.37 The vast bulk of the analysis, however, is of the textual contents rather than the physicality of the manuscript, and except in those places where discussion focuses on the manuscript copy itself, references are to the standard published edition. The main part of the Autobiography covers events from Melville’s birth in 1556 up to 1601 and was written in the period up to and around 1602.38 It is followed by a ‘Continuation’ covering 1596 to 1610, written in the latter year, and unlike the main Autobiography not surviving in a complete copy in Melville’s hand.39 The ‘Continuation’, or A True Narratioune 37 NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, ‘Mr James Melville’s Diary’. The neatness, clear layout, and relative infrequency of crossings out and corrections other than later marginal additions suggests that this manuscript may have been copied from a previous draft version. This is also suggested by the nature of corrections, which sometimes read as likely copying errors. For example, on NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 58 (cf. JMAD, 75) ‘and sweit yit [he] was not rustic nor auster bot sweit and affable in companie’: ‘sweit’ appears to have been simply written too early in the line rather than this reflecting an authorial revision of substance). As discussed at various points in the chapters which follow, the marginal insertions are more frequent, substantial, and considered, and they seem to have been added on a later occasion rather than at the immediate time of writing the main text. Perhaps because of the neatness of the copy and the distance from events (and possibly the initial draft), there are few opportunities for extensive analysis of emotional states at the time of writing from the handwriting and physical evidence on manuscript pages of the sort discussed in studies such as A. Baggerman and R. Dekker, ‘The Social World of a Dutch Boy: The Diary of Otto van Eck (1791–1796)’ in Broomhall (ed.), Emotions in the Household, 267. 38 JMAD, 3–501; NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15. 39 JMAD, 505–804. For the complex manuscript history of the ‘Continuation’ see

A.R. MacDonald, ‘A Fragment of an Early Copy of James Melville’s A True Narratioune of the Declyneing Aige of the Kirk of Scotland’, Innes Review, 47 (1996), 81–9, which suggests that in contrast to the discussion in JMAD by Robert Pitcairn, the University of Edinburgh copy of the True Narratioune (UECRC, Dc 4.10, ‘Manuscript Copy of James Melville’s ‘A true narratioune of the declyneing aige of the Kirk of Scotland’, transcribed by Ninian Dunlop, 1625’) needs further consideration by scholars as potentially closer to Melville’s (lost) original manuscript version (although itself less close to it than the small ‘Fragment’ which is the focus of the article). As well as UECRC, Dc 4.10, there are also surviving parts of the True Narratioune in roughly contemporary manuscripts UECRC MS MEL 3, ‘Manuscript copy of ‘A true narratioune of the declyneing aige of the Kirk of Scotland…’ by James Melville (1556–1614), 1594–1610’ and UECRC La. III: 335, ‘Laing III:335: Acts of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland’. Correspondingly, these manuscript versions of the True Narratioune or parts thereof have been checked, and all material discussed in this study has been cross-referenced across these versions. In the majority of cases, where there were no significant variations across versions for the purposes of this study, the published edition (JMAD) has been cited; on occasions where specific manuscript versions are discussed directly they are simply cited

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of the Declyneing Aige of the Kirk of Scotland, is substantial (comprising around a third of the full Autobiography), but it is typically less personal in content and style.40 Most of the analysis in this study focuses on the main part of the Autobiography and on the years up to around 1601.41 This study also draws on Melville’s other writings where relevant at various points to supplement the central focus on the Autobiography, and most frequently in Chapter Four’s discussion of the language, location, and

at the relevant point in the footnotes. In the more typical cases where the spelling (but not the wording) varies across manuscripts containing the True Narratioune, this has not been mentioned and the published version’s spelling has been quoted. More work could fruitfully be done on the True Narratioune’s manuscript history, but discussion in the present study is limited to relevant textual issues, not least because most of the analysis is of the main Autobiography rather than the True Narratioune. 40 See below, ‘Religious Politics and Emotion’. 41 The Autobiography also contains many transcripts of petitions, letters, ecclesiastical

documents and the like relating to the public affairs of Melville’s day: although Melville was often involved closely with these they have not typically been included extensively in this study, since they represent a separate form of writing, and are further removed from Melville’s personal experiences and authorial intent. They would repay future study for their use of emotion in political argument and polemic, but it would be arbitrary to analyse Melville’s transcripts alone, and they would need to be explored alongside a full range of equivalent documents.

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mode of Melville’s emotional expression. These works, although overlapping in theme and genre, include his pastoral treatises,42 polemical writings,43 correspondence,44 and most importantly his poetry.45 As the first study to address emotions in late sixteenth-century Scotland directly, a key element is the close reading of Melville’s discussion of emotional experiences and language on its own terms, in order to develop a full picture of these. However, some important considerations in utilising such evidence need to be considered. Firstly, the inherently subjective nature of the genre needs to be taken into account. The aim is naturally not to assess, nor to rely on, the accuracy of the historical narrative, although Melville’s account is typically reckoned to be a useful, and indeed essential source in many respects, notwithstanding its

42 J. Melville, A Spirituall Propine of a Pastour to His People (Edinburgh, 1598) [erroneously dated 1589 on the title page]; J. Melville, Ane Fruitful and Comfortable Exhortatioun Anent Death (Edinburgh, 1597). 43 See for example his poetic lament for the state of the Kirk, published posthumously as J. Melville, The Black Bastel (Edinburgh, 1634) and his satirical dialogue ‘Zelator, Temporizar, Palemon’, recorded in David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1842–1849), iv, 295–339. 44 Some of Melville’s correspondence survives within the wider collection of Andrew Melville’s correspondence: UECRC, MS Dc. 6.45: ‘Melvini Epistolae’. Most of James’ letters in this collection are to Andrew, though use has also been made of correspondence with other friends and ministerial colleagues. This has been used to supplement and shed further light on themes raised by Melville’s autobiographical writing, but the collection also deserves to be incorporated in wider studies of epistolary styles (especially in renaissance Latin) and their emotional styles and implications. Some of the correspondence is quoted in translation in T. M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville (Edinburgh, 1856): where this is the case references are provided to this fairly accessible edition; in other cases the original manuscript is cited. 45 Melville’s verse exists in a range of sources, including The Black Bastel, as verse catechism in the Spirituall Propine, and within the Autobiography itself, among other locations. Particular use has also been made of a manuscript volume of poetry in his own hand: NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, ‘Poems of James Melville, Minister of Kilrenny’. This small volume of c. 100 folios contains neat although not overly elaborate (and occasionally damaged) presentations of some of Melville’s most distinctive and longer poetic works such as ‘David’s Tragique Fall’ and the ‘Releife of the Longing Soul’, as well as a range of shorter individual poems, written towards the end of Melville’s life. I am exceptionally grateful to Dr Jamie Reid-Baxter for sharing various draft transcriptions of much of this material over the years (nevertheless any inaccuracies in my quotations from the manuscript are entirely my own).

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particular agenda.46 Equally, as suggested earlier, the aim is not merely to recover ‘how he really felt’ but the role of emotion and how it was presented, utilised, and remembered, meaning that the choices and subjectivities of autobiographical writing are themselves useful.47 Formulaic elements can be valuable for the light they shed on ‘normative’ emotional sequences and key questions about ‘how people understood their emotions’, although as it happens Melville’s very individual and distinctive voice is also often prominent in the Autobiography.48 Accordingly, this is a study of Melville’s writings more than of his life, and so the focus is typically on analysis of the language and content of his writings as they relate to his emotions, rather than on the events or experiences of his life themselves. Important within this is the inclusion of a wide range of references to emotion, and not just the most dramatic or intense incidents. Melville was of course one single individual, and no claim can be made for any sort of inherent typicality or that he alone should serve as a representative of his society, not least because his autobiographical writing is so unique in scope and survival.49 As Rosenwein has argued, there is significant value in writing emotions history with ‘microhistorical’ elements 46 Where misinterpretations have arisen from the use of Melville (and other contemporaries’ writings), it has often been a result of insufficiently critical interpretation and engagement with Melville’s specific biases and agendas (as highlighted for example in MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 171–2). Kirk, ‘Melville, James’, suggests that it is ‘generally faithful to the facts’. See however for examples of factual errors E. Holloway, Andrew Melville and Humanism in Renaissance Scotland 1545–1622 (Leiden, 2011), 36; Reid, Humanism and Calvinism, 152n; and for Melville’s retrospective distortion of aspects of Andrew Melville’s relationship with Patrick Adamson, see A.R. MacDonald, ‘Best of Enemies: Andrew Melville and Patrick Adamson, c.1574–1592’, in J. Goodare and A.A. MacDonald (eds), Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (Leiden, 2008), 260–2. 47 See above, ‘Historiography’; see also S. Broomhall, ‘Introduction: Spaces for Feeling: Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850’, in Broomhall (ed.), Spaces for Feeling, 11; Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 43, 213; C. Ulbrich, ‘Self-Narratives as a Source for the History of Emotions’, in C. Jarzebowski and T.M. Safley (eds), Childhood and Emotion: Across Cultures 1450–1800 (Abingdon, 2014), 60, 62–3. 48 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 263–3. 49 Ulbrich, ‘Self-Narratives’, 59–60. The Autobiography is an extremely early example

of religious autobiography in both the Scottish and wider Anglophone context: Melville was writing at the very start of the genre. Stewart, Oxford History of Life Writing, 3–5; K. Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford, 2012); Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self , 9.

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and focusing on revealing individuals.50 Melville’s particular perspective was that of a man, a committed Calvinist and presbyterian, and a cleric of some profile and involvement in national events.51 It is of course to be hoped that future research will widen our scope of understanding of emotion in Reformation Scotland, but it is also worth emphasising that although his personal story, spirituality, and agenda was his own, there are few obvious mechanisms by which he could have developed unique or even unusual ways of thinking about or describing emotions in general. The inherent sociality of both memory and self-writing provides another reason not to treat Melville’s retrospective autobiographical writing as a script which can only ever inform us on one individual.52 Melville was not writing with only himself in mind, and must have intended his work to resonate with his contemporaries.53 The study therefore contextualises all

50 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 12. 51 See below, ‘Conclusion’ for some reflections on the position of Melville’s masculine

and religious identity in wider contexts; for the best account so far of masculinity in Melville’s milieu see J. Nugent, ‘Reformed Masculinity: Ministers, Fathers and Male Heads of Households, 1560–1660’, in L. Abrams and E. Ewan (eds), Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinity in Scottish History (Edinburgh, 2017). A major step forward in the study of the Scottish clergy as a whole is provided by Langley, McMillan, and Newton (eds), The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland. 52 J. Pollman, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 2017), 3; M.J. Borges, ‘Narratives of the Self’ in K. Barclay, S. Crozier-De Rosa, and P.N. Stearns (eds), Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide (Abingdon, 2021), 100–1. 53 Although Melville’s particular intended audience is not made explicit, we can assume that it would have been anticipated to reach at least members of his family and circle, perhaps posthumously. Indeed, it was referred to and quoted from directly by others, most notably David Calderwood (for examples see Calderwood, History, v, 179, 307 [cf. JMAD, 299, 315]), and in a separate collection of documents relating to the General Assembly Melville included the comment ‘sie the Buik of my Lyfe’ (JMAD, lxxxvi; UECRC La. III: 335, n.p., immediately before entry for 30 March 1593). The main manuscript also includes some, though by no means all, of the overt physical signs of direct presentation to audiences which are discussed in Cambers, ‘Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing’, 808–11 (see also 819–24 for further discussion of the inherent ‘sociability’ of English examples of the genre). For example, although it does not include particularly striking devices like manicules, descriptive running heads, indices or consistent rubrics summarising content, it does deploy occasional marginal comments for emphasis (e.g. ‘Mr Robert Bruce’: see below, ‘Friendship’); a neat authorial heading on the title page; some elaborate initial capital letters; running heads with dates for much of the volume; fairly clear paragraphing, and wide margins (albeit the margins are sometimes utilised for additional text). See for example NLS, Adv. Ms., 34.4.15, pp. 1, 9, 13, 32, 104–5, 317.

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of Melville’s writings relating to emotion within their specific religious, political, and social frameworks, but also proposes that the case study approach can develop our understanding of the emotional lives of early modern Scots more generally. The study begins in Chapter 2 with the most familiar aspect of emotion in studies of early modern British Protestants: the personal spiritual journey starting with sorrow and fear relating to sin. Having first explored this aspect, Chapter 2 then also moves on to consider Melville’s experience and use of emotion in relation to the controversial religious politics of his life and period. Chapter 3 analyses Melville’s representation of emotion in discussion of his social relationships, structured around the circles of family, friendship, and his flock as a parish minister. Chapter 4 adopts a more thematic approach, exploring key elements in Melville’s emotional vocabulary and range, and in his language, location, and representation of emotion. As well as synthesising this material, the Conclusion steps back to consider the implications and possibilities for further research expanding outwards from this case study. Details from Melville’s life story are discussed at the relevant points when analysing the emotional evidence from his writing, but in order to familiarise the reader with Melville’s general biography, the rest of this Introduction provides an overview of his life and the wider national events which shaped his experiences.

Biographical and Historical Survey James Melville was born in 1556 and raised in Angus, near the burgh of Montrose where he attended school in the 1560s.54 His mother died when he was a baby, and his father, Richard Melville, was one of the first generation of Protestant ministers after the Reformation Parliament of 1560, serving at Craig and Maryton, just outside Montrose.55 Despite his father’s initial wishes, James was keen to pursue a clerical career himself. He studied at the University of St Andrews, graduating in 1572 before following his uncle Andrew Melville to Glasgow University a few years later to teach at the institution where his uncle had become principal. 54 For biographical summaries of Melville see also Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; McCallum, ‘“Sone and Servant”’, 203–4. 55 H. Scott, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1915–50), v, 405.

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He developed his theological study and training there. His father, and his sister Isobel, to whom he had been very close in childhood, both died during this period. In 1579, he met his future wife, Elizabeth Durie, daughter of the radical Edinburgh minister John Durie. The next year, in his mid-twenties, he again followed his uncle back to St Andrews University, where he remained for several years. On 1 May 1583, he married Elizabeth, an event which coincided with a General Assembly where Melville’s party in the Kirk was in an optimistic mood following the Ruthven Raid.56 Indeed, at this point, it is necessary to introduce the key wider events which shaped Melville’s life and experiences from the early 1580s onwards. This was a dramatic and tumultuous time for James. His uncle Andrew was involved in the drafting of the second Book of Discipline in 1578 which famously established presbyterian principles for the Kirk of Scotland, and James believed very strongly in this form of church governance.57 While historians now prefer not to speak of a strictly defined ‘Melvillian’ party, and to avoid exaggerating the sharpness of the battlelines, especially at this early stage of the conflict, the main fact which would shape James’ experiences was his deep commitment to the position opposed to bishops and their authority, and in favour of ministerial parity and independent clerical rather than crown governance of the Kirk.58 This cause was central to Melville’s life, and indeed it was the central thrust which drove much of the Autobiography’s narrative. In the summer of 1582, the Ruthven ‘raiders’, a political faction both antiCatholic and friendlier to the presbyterian tendency than the previously dominant Lennox faction had been, seized the young King James and held him for nearly a year, and it was in this context that James married Elizabeth during the General Assembly of late April and early May of 1583. This was a moment of hope and opportunity for Melville’s party, 56 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; JMAD, 136; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 23. 57 Kirk, James, ‘Melville, Andrew (1545–1622), University Principal and Theologian’,

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 16. 58 MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk; MacDonald, ‘Best of Enemies’, 276; R.A. Mason and

S.J. Reid, ‘Introduction’, in Mason and Reid (eds), Andrew Melville, 2; see also for an excellent recent survey A.R. MacDonald, ‘Church and State in Scotland from the Reformation to the Covenanting Revolution’, in W. Hazlett (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland, ca. 1525–1638: Frameworks of Change and Development (Leiden, 2022), esp. 612–23.

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when they saw the opportunity to fulfil the work of independent clerical and godly rule started in 1560. This only heightened the sense of disappointment following the King’s escape soon after and the downfall of the Ruthven regime. Predictably, in its aftermath, there was a backlash as the crown and the new regime led by the Earl of Arran moved towards episcopal policies in late 1583 and early 1584.59 As Chapter 2 discusses in more detail, this led to a dark time for the young Melville, who was already looking to commence his ministerial career, and who was personally very close to his uncle Andrew, a prominent figure in the cause. Disaster came at the level of both policy and personal relationships in this period. Andrew was forced to flee to England in February 1584, and James’ father-in-law John Durie was banished to Montrose. Meanwhile, the regime passed the ‘Black Acts’ in May 1584, asserting royal supremacy over the Kirk, enhancing direct control by the crown and repressing presbyteries.60 Following this, James and other ministers fled to exile in England, starting in Berwick, and then Newcastle. This was a formative as well as a difficult stage in James’ career. He ministered to Scottish lords who had also been exiled, and it was here that he developed his earliest pastoral writing in the form of an order and instructions for routine worship and discipline in the exile community.61 He also observed with horror the betrayal—as he saw it—of those ministers who remained and subscribed to the ‘Black Acts’ under pressure from the crown.62 These sorts of experiences would set the tone for much of the rest of his career, although the dramatic shifts in fortunes in the mid-1580s came in unusually quick succession. Indeed, the exile would come to an end in November 1585. The Arran regime in turn fell, enabling Melville to return to Scotland.63 On the national level, this saw the beginnings of a happier time for Melville’s cause, as King James, now firmly in the period of his personal rule, relaxed some of the 1584 policies, and presbyteries were able to resume functioning. The next decade or so has even been referred to as a ‘golden age

59 MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 23–5; J. Dawson, Scotland Re-formed, 1488–1587 (Edinburgh, 2007), 310–2. 60 MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 25–6. 61 JMAD, 181–5. 62 MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 28. 63 MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 29.

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for presbyterianism’, although this is amplified by the reversal in fortunes that would later follow from 1596, and even before then, there were significant political difficulties for Melville and his allies, as well as challenging work in his role at St Andrews University.64 But the post-exile period was certainly a slightly less dramatic one in James’ life, and he had the chance to settle down as a minister, husband, and father. In 1586, at the not unusual age of thirty, Melville began his ministerial career in Anstruther and Kilrenny in the East Neuk of Fife. He was a committed parish minister, was involved with a tightening of church discipline, and would later produce a pastoral treatise as a gift or ‘Propine’ to his flock in Kilrenny, the sole charge of which he took up in 1590.65 His eldest son, Ephraim, had been born during Melville’s exile in 1585, and his second, Andrew, was born in St Andrews during the summer of 1586. With Elizabeth Durie, Melville would go on to have a further five children, although the first Andrew and a subsequent Margaret would die in infancy.66 Although for two decades from 1586 he remained based in his Fife parish and produced various writings and raised his family, church politics was still central to his life and life-writing. The period of comparative presbyterian ascendancy (and comparative calm in Melville’s career) during the 10 years or so following the end of the Arran regime in 1585 was based on a degree of compromise and cooperation between kirk and crown which did not obscure the underlying tensions between the two competing visions for religious policy. Even the ‘Golden Act’ of 1592, which recognised the preferred presbyterian structure of ecclesiastical courts and was much welcomed, was followed by a growing move towards direct conflict between James VI’s desire for royal control in matters ecclesiastical and the Kirk’s contrasting ‘two kingdoms’ theory (which would be most dramatically captured in Andrew Melville’s famous riposte to the King that he was consequently ‘bot a member’ of the Kirk).67 While James was recognised as generally more diplomatic than his uncle, he was no less perturbed by events such as the prosecution of the St Andrews minister David Black for seditious preaching. 64 MacDonald, ‘Church and State’, 616; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 33 and passim; Reid, Humanism and Calvinism, 131–2. 65 J. McCallum, Reforming the Scottish Parish: The Reformation in Fife, 1560–1640 (Farnham, 2010), 53–5, 123; Melville, Spirituall Propine. 66 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; JMAD, 251, 254. 67 MacDonald, ‘Church and State’, 616–8; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 48–9.

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More broadly, from 1597 the tide was turning towards the fuller and more formal restoration of bishops, although this was a gradual development.68 When the main part of the Autobiography closes around 1601, and as often by this stage in his life, Melville was very ill, although apparently still aiming to play a part in the struggle. At this point, it could not have been predicted how dramatic the impact of church politics on the rest of James’ life would turn out to be.69 Following the union of the crowns in 1603, James VI and I shifted the balance further away from General Assemblies and towards government of the church by bishops. A group of ministers held what was considered by the crown an illegal General Assembly in 1605. This set in motion the warding and imprisonment of presbyterian ministers, and a parliament in 1606 whose business included the restoration of full diocesan and parliamentary episcopacy.70 As public defenders of the 1605 Assembly and public opponents of episcopacy, Melville and his uncle were prominent among the ministers summoned to London in 1606. This commenced James’ second, and as it would turn out permanent, period of exile in England. It began in London where James, serving as spokesperson for the Scottish ministers, was in conference with the King and his representatives, although the royal intent was to persuade and enforce rather than to negotiate. In 1607, with the other ministers confined to their Scottish parishes, and Andrew sent to the Tower, James found himself, as before, living in exile in Newcastle and Berwick.71 As well as being separated from his uncle for the rest of his life, with Andrew subsequently exiled to France in 1611 and their only remaining contact coming via correspondence, this final disaster was to mark the end of any plausible hopes for the revival and victory of their cause. Further blows came in 1610 with the Glasgow General Assembly’s solidification of royal control and explicit episcopal authority over the Kirk.72 Around this time, Melville wrote the ‘Continuation’ of the Autobiography, the True Narratioune of

68 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; MacDonald, ‘Church and State’, 618–21. 69 JMAD, 500. 70 MacDonald, ‘Church and State’, 620–1; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 106–21. 71 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, 124–6; MacDonald, ‘Church and

State’, 621. 72 MacDonald, ‘Church and State’, 622.

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the Declyneing Aige of the Kirk of Scotland, and further bemoaned the downfall of the Scottish Kirk in allegorical verse in The Black Bastel.73 This period of exile in Berwick also saw the death of Melville’s first wife, Elizabeth. Melville married again, not without some disagreement with his uncle, who criticised his choice of the youthful Deborah Clerk over a more evenly aged match with a widow Melville had stayed with in Newcastle. James went ahead and married Deborah in 1612. They had no children, and Melville died less than two years later in Berwick, aged 57.74 We have a detailed report of his deathbed, which naturally should be taken to represent expected ideals and hagiographical intent rather than a verbatim transcript. Nevertheless, it reflects the style of piety which Melville himself expressed in his writings. His prayers were apparently ‘verie pithie, with manie tearis’, and comfort was found in Psalm 16: ‘in thy sicht are the fulnes of all joys, at thy right hand is the plenty of pleasures for evir’.75 The length of the deathbed account is one hint at the importance of James Melville to his contemporaries in the Kirk. His reputation is not our main interest, but it is worth concluding this biographical overview by noting how he was perceived and remembered. One of the best-known characterisations, from his successor as leading presbyterian historiographer, David Calderwood, states that Melville ‘acted his part so gravelie, so wiselie, so calmelie, that the adversarie could gett no vantage’. From the ‘adversary’ Archbishop Spottiswoode’s perspective, perhaps an essentially similar assessment is suggested by the label ‘crafty’, and observations that he would not give a ‘direct answer’ to questions.76 He was a more subtle operator than Andrew, and indeed Andrew’s greater fame has tended to overshadow James’ reputation in the long term.77 However, as ReidBaxter’s work on a 1619 dialogue which features Melville posthumously also shows, in the years following his death, he was remembered as a

73 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; see above, ‘Sources and Methodology’. 74 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’. 75 JMAD, lvi–lxiv, quotes at lvii. 76 Calderwood, History, vii, 190; Kirk, ‘Melville, James’; J. Spottiswoode, History of the Church of Scotland (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1847–1851), iii, 180. 77 McCallum,‘“Sone and Servant”, 211–2.

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significant figure in the Kirk and one whose reputation for living ‘peacably’ could plausibly be expected to resonate with readers.78 There are enough references to this characterisation of Melville in enough places for us safely to consider it a fair representation of how his personality was remembered. But, then as now, exterior calmness, gravity, or peaceability should never be mistaken for an absence of inner emotional upheaval, or dynamism. And more broadly, his reputation was unavoidably discussed by those most interested in his contributions to ecclesiastical and public affairs. As vital as these were to him, the rest of this study will explore how the emotional expression in his writing covers a wider landscape, and offers us a more holistic set of insights into the possibilities and frameworks of emotional life in the period.

78 Reid-Baxter, ‘Posthumous Preaching’, 73, 80–1, 86; see also JMAD, lxv–lxxiv, for memorial poems on Melville’s death.

CHAPTER 2

Religious Experiences

Abstract This chapter explores those parts of Melville’s emotional experience and expression which relate directly to religion. This is divided into two parts: the first part focuses on Melville’s personal faith and spirituality, and the role of emotion in his early development and vocation for the clergy. The second part focuses on the emotional impact of Melville’s involvement in church politics via the conflict between rival tendencies in Scottish Protestantism, and in particular addresses the role of emotion in his representation of this conflict. Keywords Affective piety · Faith · Childhood · Clergy · Religious conflict · Presbyterianism

Introduction Melville’s Autobiography was, among other things, a narrative of religious experiences. This chapter focuses on religion and emotion directly: it begins by addressing the emotional elements and representation of Melville’s personal spiritual journey and its specific contours, before moving on to consider the less familiar subject of emotion in Melville’s experience of the controversial church politics with which he was closely involved as a presbyterian minister. He represented these personal and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0_2

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political experiences and struggles in distinctly emotional terms, and associated the legitimacy of the cause with the authentic emotional impact it had on him and his brethren.

The Personal Spiritual Journey The most obvious starting point for a discussion of Melville’s emotional experiences is his personal spiritual narrative. Alec Ryrie’s work has shown that early modern British Protestantism as a broad culture could be experienced by individuals not as a dry or scholastic enterprise but as a deeply intense and dynamic emotional journey.1 Moreover, elements of Melville’s Autobiography can be placed within the traditions of the wellknown phenomenon of the puritan spiritual diary, and likewise, within the context of Yeoman’s work on the emotional drive behind the Scottish covenanting movement of the mid-seventeenth century.2 This section therefore covers what is perhaps the most familiar theme in the subject of Protestantism and emotions. It will inform the wider and more holistic exploration of Melville’s emotional worlds, and also explore the specific ways in which a late sixteenth-century Scot recorded and understood the emotional dynamics of his spiritual progress. A key motive for writing the Autobiography is claimed by Melville as ‘thankfulness of hart’ for God’s providential blessings and gift of grace to him, and this thread runs through much of the narrative.3 The work itself is therefore positioned as flowing from Melville’s heartfelt gratitude to God, as well as recording the development of that relationship (from the very start when Melville was, as he puts it in the first line, ‘brought from the wombe of his mother be [by] God’).4 A dominant early theme is the subject of sin, the unavoidable starting point of the

1 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 3–4, chs 1–5. 2 Yeoman, ‘Heart-work’; Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, esp. 100–1; Lynch, Protestant

Autobiography. Although sharing many of the introspective, soul-searching, and providential features of this tradition, Melville’s text offers a retrospective autobiographical approach, rather than the daily or routine self-examination diaries associated with the Cambridge circle of Richard Rogers, Samuel Ward and others (on which see for example Stewart, Oxford History of Life-Writing, 141). 3 JMAD, 13; Yeoman, ‘Melville and the Covenant of Grace’, 575. 4 This opening is prefaced by quotations chosen from Psalms to reflect this idea: JMAD,

13.

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religious journey for a contemporary Calvinist, and a fearful emotional response to manifestations of his sinfulness. Melville records various incidents of wrongdoing, including wounding another child with a knife, and how he was ‘sa [so] humble, sa feared, sa greived, yeild sa manie teares’ as a consequence.5 At the same time, Melville seeks and recalls signs of God stirring a ‘motion’ in his heart, the signs of God’s gift of grace. Before he was ten, ‘that Sprit of sanctification begining to work sum motiones in my hart’, he began to pray regularly, including in the fields, ‘with a sweit moving in my hart’.6 He was ‘movit to giff [give] guid eare’ to scriptural readings and took ‘plesure’ in the Psalms, and later on found ‘sum sweit and constant motiones of the feir and love of God within me’.7 These themes of deep sorrow for sin, and sweetness stirred in his heart by God then develop into discussion of Melville’s vocation and journey towards the ministry, and are often particularly frequent and strong in the very early stages of the Autobiography. It is an intensity which seems to reinforce Ryrie’s interpretation of much Protestant emotion as strong but complex, rather than straightforwardly categorisable into positive or negative.8 Melville recalled how his sister’s reading from scripture and singing caused him both to ‘greit [weep] and be glad’, and similarly the preacher James Lawson produced ‘teares bath of remors and joy’.9 Often the representation of the emotional experience was neither purely sorrowful nor joyful, but an extreme intermingling of the two.10 As this last example suggests, the hearing of sermons was recalled as a particularly emotional experience for the young Melville.11 He arrived at university early enough to hear John Knox himself preach, and remembered that ‘in the opening up of his text he was moderat the space of an halff houre; bot when he enterit to application, he maid me sa to grew [shudder] and tremble, that I could nocht hald a pen to wryt’.12 5 JMAD, 21; see also 19. 6 JMAD, 16; see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 163 for the practice of field prayer. 7 JMAD, 22, 36–7. 8 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 94–5. 9 JMAD, 18, 52. 10 See also below, ‘Melville’s Emotional Range’. 11 For the stirring of feeling in Scottish sermons, see Todd, Culture of Protestantism,

51–3. 12 JMAD, 26.

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This emphasis on a physical response was not limited to the most famous reformer: in another discussion of James Lawson, Melville returned to the text to add personal details in the manuscript’s margins, which note that he never heard him preach ‘bot he meltit my hart with teares’, and he was similarly moved to tears by the sermon-like performance of a madman to the young king in 1580.13 The analogy of hot and cold was applied to differing types of preachers, such as when the ‘cauldnes of Mr Robert Hamiltone’s ministerie’ was contrasted with the heat and zeal of his uncle Andrew’s.14 And later, the teaching of Robert Bruce could bring ‘grait joy and comfort’.15 Melville sought to position effective and emotive preaching as important in his early stirring up of piety, as well as to establish a link to his future development and vocation as a preacher. One of the most significant and striking stages in this early vocational journey came in Melville’s teenage years when, in 1571, he was working in the harvest. He did not enjoy this, preferring academic study, and as he approached ‘Marie-kirk’, where his father was the preacher, I begoude [began] to weirie soar of my lyff; and as my coustome haid bein fra my bernheid [from my childhood] to pray in my hart, and mein my esteat [express my state] to my God, coming fornent [in front of] the kirk, and luiking to it, the Lord steirit upe ane extraordinar motion in my hart, quhilk maid me atteans [which made me at once], being alean, to fall on gruiff [prostrate] to the ground and pour out a schort and ernest petition to God, that it wald please his guidnes to offer occasion to continow me at the scholles [schools], and inclyne my father’s hart till [to] use the saming [same].16

There are several intriguing emotional dynamics to this story, including the apparent link to a specific sense of place, and the relationship with his father.17 But at its core is the extreme and sudden physical response

13 JMAD, 33, 82; NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 28. It is not apparent how much later the details on Lawson were added, but the nib of the pen was significantly blunter when they were written. 14 JMAD, 124–5. 15 JMAD, 148. 16 JMAD, 24. 17 See below, ‘Family’.

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to the frustrated desire to study, and to pursue a ministerial vocation. Melville then vows to work towards ministerial service, and ‘rysing from the ground with joy and grait contenment in hart, again fell downe and worschipped, and sa past on and did the earand, retourning and praising my God, singing sum Psalmes’.18 The sense of a moment of crisis, followed by a vow to a clerical vocation, is a familiar trope for Protestant reformers, but Melville is at pains to convey the depth of experience, and combination of great despair and great joy.19 The story goes beyond the theological narrative of fear of sin and the joy in glimpses of salvation, to suggest a central emotional thrust in Melville’s understanding of his specific journey towards the ministry. This vocational journey then continues to be recounted via emotional experiences. It was recorded as a difficult process, to a greater extent than would seem to be required by convention, both through his pessimistic view of his intellectual abilities (‘a babling of words without wit’ in contrast with the ‘sweit and constant motiones’ sometimes worked by God in him), and because of tensions with his father’s wishes.20 There was a sense of anxiety in the time that he was progressing towards the ministry: he recorded ‘grait fear and cear [care] quhilk [which] was in my hart of my inhabilitie to undertak and bear out sa grait a charge as to profess Theologie and holie tounges amangs ministers and maisters’.21 Albeit an extremely common experience among novice practitioners in any profession, the nerves and anxiety are deliberately emphasised and contrasted with the time in which Melville was writing the recollections: some preaching in St Andrews was ‘done with grait tentationes [trials] and mikle [much] trembling and fear in the present tyme, but now rememberit to the graittest joy of my hart’.22 It was a struggle which could be looked back on more fondly than it was experienced at the time, adding to a persistent sense of nostalgia in the Autobiography. The intensity of

18 JMAD, 24. 19 M. Mullett, Martin Luther (2nd edn, London, 2015), 41–4. Melville had also been

encouraged to study Law, but ‘my hart was nocht sett that way’: JMAD, 29. 20 JMAD, 36–7. 21 JMAD, 84. 22 JMAD, 86. See Dawson, Knox, 42–6 for Knox’s difficult experience of his early calling.

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Melville’s depiction of his early religious experience was not confined to the familiar individual narrative of sin, grace, and salvation. Often, especially after Melville’s early spiritual development and establishment as a preacher, the thread of personal spiritual progress and providential relationship with God is developed by locating God’s work, and approval, in the heart. This organ was for contemporary preachers the literal repository of feeling, rather than a metaphor for feeling.23 When first considering fleeing to Berwick, the decision is made ‘after consultation with my God, and finding of his warrand in my hart’; similarly during exile at Newcastle, he decides to agree to minister to the nobles there ‘finding the warrand of God sattelit [settled] in my hart’.24 There are also repeated references to God, echoing scripture, as the ‘searcher of hearts’, used to affirm the authenticity of feelings such as the ‘pitie and indignation of my hart (as the Cerschar of hartes knawes!)’, or Melville’s genuine sorrow at the overthrow of the ministry of St Andrews in 1597, ‘as the cersar of harts and reanes [kidneys] knawes’.25 God’s direct intervention and knowledge, and evidence of personal authenticity, are located in the body and above all in the heart. Melville’s personal spiritual narrative of sin, fear, salvation, and comfort demonstrates how the emotional spirituality increasingly established for early modern Protestantism was embodied within Scottish Calvinism.26 This approach to emotional expression was not only evident in the conversion and salvation narrative; it was also tightly integrated with his own path to the ministry. The extent to which these ways of viewing one’s emotions in relation to the spiritual journey are embedded in and central to his writing suggests that this had become established by the end of the sixteenth century. It also adds to the need to challenge wider stereotypes of an unfeeling personal religion. But the personal spiritual narrative is by no means the only emotional element in Melville’s experiences or the

23 For a concise summary of the significance of the ‘heart’ in the early modern religious emotions, see Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 248–50. 24 JMAD, 168, 172; for the background to his exile see above, ‘Biographical and Historical Survey’. 25 JMAD, 275, 423; see also 607. ‘Harts and reanes’ echoes biblical phrasing (e.g. Psalms 7:9; Jeremiah 11:20), and the reins/kidneys were seen as the seat of the affections: DSL, ‘Reinis’, definitions 1 and 2. 26 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 268.

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only way in which his experiences help us to understand sixteenth-century Scottish emotions, nor necessarily the most important.

Religious Politics and Emotion There is a tendency for writing about emotions to focus on the most interior and personal experiences, and for early modern British Protestants, the cycle of sin, sorrow, fear, and comfort established above has almost entirely dominated the subject. But it is vital that we avoid separating emotions from wider political or other concerns: as Rosenwein puts it, ‘emotions should not be separated from whatever else communities were engaged in’.27 This section therefore turns to Melville’s emotional responses to the religious politics with which he was often personally involved, and always concerned about. This will involve analysis of issues which could be seen as less directly personal than either his own spiritual journey and piety, or elements of his life such as his relationship with family, friends, and his congregation (the subjects of the following chapter). However, his autobiographical writing clearly sits at the intersection of the personal and self-based narrative, and the public chronicle or history. Although the public events often drive the narrative, unlike in many early modern chronicles there is often a very strong element of Melville’s personal voice within the text.28 What was the emotional impact of the turbulent church politics of the 1580s and 1590s, and just as importantly, how was emotion understood and utilised in Melville’s writing about it? Some ideological context is needed here. Given that our interest, however, is in Melville’s own perspective and experiences, a brief outline will suffice.29 Our understanding of the arguments over authority and power in the Kirk has been developed and nuanced immensely in the last thirty years, and in particular, an awareness of the complex and gradual emergence of different tendencies within the Kirk has replaced 27 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 275–6. Albeit in a very different set of political

contexts, this theme is also developed in some of the case-studies in Tarantino and Zika (eds), Feeling Exclusion. 28 E. Kuijpers, ‘Histories, Chronicles, and Memoirs’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, 103–4. 29 See also above, ‘Biographical and Historical Survey’, for the chronology and further narrative of the conflict.

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older notions of pre-ordained and binary struggle between fixed presbyterian and episcopalian camps.30 Indeed, Melville’s text is itself one of the foundational sources for the presbyterian confessional historiography of the period. As Andrew Melville’s nephew, Melville associated himself from an early age with what would come to be seen as the presbyterian cause. He and the ministers he admired and collaborated with tended to oppose episcopacy, both in its principles and in its individual representatives. They were equally opposed to royal authority over the Kirk, which in keeping with the idea of ‘Two Kingdoms’ was to be independently governed by the godly clergy, and organised in presbyterian structures. As well as royal and episcopal interference, they were worried about resources and funding for the Kirk, especially to fund ministerial stipends. This is a simplistic summary of the issues at stake, but the purpose is to contextualise Melville’s inherently binary and partisan depiction of church politics, and the following analysis is naturally not concerned with the accuracy of Melville’s account of the events. Although the Autobiography covers a wide range of experiences, a central thread running through it is this ecclesiological struggle. Melville summarises the conflict in a phrase which indicates the seriousness and stark simplicity with which he saw it: ‘the quarrel of Thy Chryst within this land’.31 Melville flags up for the reader early on that a sharp emotional connection to the public affairs and fortunes of the Kirk will be central to his story. Recalling his childhood, he noted that news of political events and developments reached him in the mid-1560s, such as the murder of David Rizzio and even the financial problems facing the new Kirk concerning clerical stipends.32 He notes that ‘even at that tyme, me thought the heiring of these things moved me, and stak in my hart with sum joy or sorrow, as I hard [heard] they might helpe or hender the Relligion’.33 This demonstrates his desire to emphasise a literally heartfelt connection to the Kirk’s fortunes as something which was present from his childhood, and employing a classical technique in autobiographical writing, to prefigure it as immediately central to the narrative and his later

30 The definitive study here is MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk; see also Reid, Humanism and Calvinism; MacDonald. ‘Church and State’. 31 JMAD, 500. 32 Dawson, Scotland Re-formed, 256–7, 270. 33 JMAD, 18.

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character.34 Correspondingly, the ups and downs which befall the Kirk especially after 1583 to the end of the century are frequently recorded in strong and directly emotional language. In 1584, observing events in Scotland from exile in Berwick, he condemned the ‘hated and fearit… wicked men’, and complained how the good men were ‘oppressed with sic greiff that they weiried of thair lyvis’. When the ally John Craig caved in to pressure to conform with royal policy, ‘the harts of guid men war broken and discuragit’, and interestingly a marginal addition to the manuscript is used to reinforce the point, ending ‘heirin grevit us all to the verie hart’.35 As well as persistent references to the heart as the primary means through which these affairs are experienced, also significant is the fact that Melville penned a letter sharply rebuking the brethren who remained in Scotland ‘with grait motion and greiff of mynd’.36 ‘Motion’ here appears to be used in a similar way to the contemporary understanding of the word ‘emotion’ involving ‘physical disturbance and bodily movement’, suggesting something more disorderly and unstable rather than a neutral label for feeling.37 The word therefore emphasises that the letter was written with considerable stirring and inner turmoil, over and above being written with ‘emotion’. The personal impact on Melville was sometimes remembered in very severe emotional terms. In the ‘dark and heavie wintar’ of 1583, following a fairly typical reference to ‘bitter teares and heavie lamentation’ and an expectation of ‘graitter and graitter missour [measure] of horrour and feirfulnes’, Melville employs a characteristically dramatic nautical metaphor. The faithful minister James Lawson foresaw a ‘tempest’ coming upon the ship of the Kirk and its ‘wyesest, stouttest, and ableast schippars and mariners removit’.38 Melville then recalls his personal response:

34 Stewart, Oxford History of Life-Writing, 25. 35 JMAD, 198–9; NLS, Adv. Ms., p. 144. 36 JMAD, 199. The letter itself is included within the Autobiography (200–18) and

serves as an example of how correspondence and direct political rhetoric could also be explored as genres for their emotional dynamics and approaches. 37 P. Simons, ‘Emotion’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, 36–7; T. Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review, 4 (2012), 338–44 at 340. 38 JMAD, 139, 144–5.

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As for my selff, to confes the treuthe, I was almaist exanimat [extinguished39 ] with heavines of hart, the quhilk [which], if it haid nocht resolvit in aboundance of teares, my lyff haid bein suffocat[ed]; for the quhilk cause I tuk me to a chalmer, and closing the dur, let me [my] affectiones brak out, and go louse at randon, quhilk a speciall loving frind of myne, wating on me, sufferit for the space of an houre; bot efter, knokkit sa, and spak to me, that bathe for love and reverence it behovit me till [to] opin, wha [who] nocht onlie usit all the comforts he could, bot wated upon me, and convoyed me ham [home] to St Androis.40

While it would be impossible to categorise this experience definitively, especially given the fraught nature of psychological historical diagnosis, the incident is recalled in terms which evoke a panic attack or nervous breakdown, and its severity is indicated by the reference to affections breaking out and going ‘louse at randon’. The release from ‘suffocation’ coming through ‘aboundance of teares’ is also striking in suggesting the seriousness of Melville’s emotional experience of ecclesiastical politics. At the same time, it also demonstrates the specific use of vivid emotional description to convey the significance of events and implicitly to convey the rectitude of the cause.41 As the 1580s and 1590s progress, the severe emotional impact on Melville of the struggle, and the affective style in which he narrates it persists. While not present in every passage or in every anecdote, it is a recurring theme. It is often tied to the impact on Melville’s closer colleagues, such as when Lawson stayed with Melville and although ‘it was a grait comfort and joy [to have him] bot to sie him in sic perplexitie, sorow, and melancholie, it wald haiff greivit the hart of anie that loved the cause of Chryst’.42 Emotional recollections are sometimes inserted as an addition in the margins of the manuscript as well, suggesting a desire to ensure they were remembered even when they were not required for 39 ‘Exanimat’ here literally means made inanimate, i.e. killed or ‘deprived of life’ as DSL summarises it, but this gloss has been provided as capturing something closer to the more spiritual and metaphorical wording chosen by Melville, rather than the more starkly biological ‘killed’. 40 JMAD, 145. 41 See also some subsequent discussion of the negative impact of events on the reform

work at St Andrews University as a ‘daylie hart-brak’, and a ‘cauld heavie lumpe lyand [lying] on my hart, lyking for to chok me’: JMAD, 146. 42 JMAD, 166.

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the reader to follow the sequence of events. For example in discussion of 1599, Melville added (for special attention with lines drawn around it to form a box, unlike the vast majority of marginal insertions): ‘Strange and vehement war the exerceises of my mynd during that tyme, quhilk [which] God, wha hes a secret delling with his awin secret annes [ones], knawes’.43 It has been suggested that this may include ‘private troubles of conscience’ relating to recent events involving John Dykes; in any case, the phrasing suggests a more complex psychological experience than straightforward sorrow.44 Indeed by the conclusion of the main Autobiography a sort of nervous despair and breakdown, and indeed physical illness, represented in phrases like ‘heavie seiknes of body, and grait conflictes of mynd’, took over as prospects for the presbyterian cause came to look bleaker.45 While the more striking events involving persecution of Melville and his allies, exile, and what was from his point of view an increasingly dark time for the Kirk often prompted extensive emotional recollection and condemnation, there was some significant use of emotional language to discuss less obviously dramatic or personally tumultuous ecclesiastical issues. While Melville was a child, Isobel apparently showed him a pamphlet ballad about the ministers without stipends, and cried 43 JMAD, 444; NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 331. 44 J. Reid-Baxter, ‘The Nyne Muses, An Unknown Renaissance Sonnet Sequence: John

Dykes and the Gowrie Conspiracy’, in. A.A. MacDonald and K. Dekker (eds), Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality: Essays on the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Leuven, 2005), 199. 45 JMAD, 488, 489 [quotation], 493–4. Interestingly, around this time Melville apparently expressed a willingness to serve as the minister on an expedition for the plantation of a church on the island of Lewis when the Presbytery of St Andrews was approached about this on 2 April 1601, possibly shortly before the severe illness he recalled commencing ‘at the begining of April’ that year (JMAD, 489). At the 2 April meeting, Melville showed himself ‘willing gif the presbyterie thocht it meit’; however, ‘in respect of gryter necessitie at hame quhilk wald crave his assistance thei culd nocht aggrie to want his pressence’ and suggested Robert Durie be considered instead. The reasons for Melville’s conditional assent cannot be discerned, but it seems unlikely he would have been well enough for the journey shortly thereafter, even had the Presbytery declared themselves willing to spare him. Of course, he may possibly have known or suspected that they would veto his departure in any case. M. Smith, ‘The Presbytery of St Andrews 1586–1605: A Study and Annotated Edition of the Register of the Minutes of the Presbytery of St Andrews’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1985), 342; for the context of the plantation see A. MacCoinnich, Plantation and Civility in the North Atlantic World: The Case of the Northern Hebrides, 1570–1639 (Leiden, 2015), esp. 91–118.

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out some of David Lindsay’s verse on the subject. She ‘burst furthe in teares’, and this made James to ‘quak [quake] and chout [cry out] bitterlie, quhilk left the deipest stampe of God’s fear in my hart of anie thing that ever I haid hard before’.46 Melville was particularly close to this sister and her own display of emotion may have been important in shaping his own response; but again, even allowing for exaggeration in the recollection and depiction, the way in which the incident is recorded shows a desire to foreground direct and personal affective responses in understanding ecclesiastical affairs. Similarly, the ministerial shortages in Melville’s Fife parishes in the mid-1580s, albeit connected to the more general ‘unhappie tyme’ for the Kirk, were referred to as a ‘desolate miserie’.47 The ‘obtrudit’ minister Robert Wood, was apparently imposed on parishioners who disliked him, causing ‘very grait dissentioun in thair bowelles, quhilk vexed tham with anguise of mynd, grait peanes [pains] and expences’. Melville’s view was a partisan one, but more important for our purposes was the use of an embodied emotional description to convey the unpopularity of an ungodly minister. When ministerial provision improved, the congregational response was, correspondingly, ‘grait joy and confort’.48 As this last phrase hints, the inevitably negative emotional experiences resulting from church politics in the late sixteenth century should not obscure the significance of positive emotional language and description when recording happier developments. Recalling the optimistic meetings of 1579 in Edinburgh concerning presbyteries and university reform, Melville stated ‘it was a maist pleasand and confortable thing to be present at these Assemblies’ with their ‘haliness in zeall at the doctrine’ and ‘consent and unitie of mynd’, with those present in harmonious agreement as ‘all strak [struck] on a [one] string and soundet a harmonie’. The ‘exceiding guid fallowschipe’ of these brethren was fondly remembered in Melville’s writing.49 The evocative analogy reflected Melville’s love of music, and his strong positive memory of and nostalgia for these events. ‘Joy’ and ‘comfort’ also recur in depictions of fasting, covenanting, and

46 JMAD, 19; see also Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 69. 47 JMAD, 3. 48 JMAD, 4. 49 JMAD, 77–9.

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godly exercises.50 Comfort is a recurring positive term, logically enough for a political journey often marked by failure or exclusion. Indeed, when discussing the opposition James and Andrew faced in St Andrews, he noted ‘it was a confortable thing in these dayes to haiff a guid cause in hand and stand be it’, comfort being found in steadfastness to the cause. Again this is followed up with a sense of nostalgia: ‘sa mikle the mair [so much the more] is the loss thairof to be deplored in this declyning age and tyme’.51 Similarly the taking of Stirling in 1585 was fondly and evocatively recalled: ‘we graithimlie [greatly] rejoysing in the soveran guidnes and mercie of our God’, as was shortly after returning to Scotland (following the end of the Arran regime) optimistically and ‘swelling upe be hope, inquenchable joy of reformation of all things amiss, and grait welcoming with manie guid-morrowes’.52 Here again friendship, sincere and physically expressed (‘swelling’) joy and hopefulness are recorded nostalgically, even though what came next was a return to the ‘greiff’ of sourer times for his party.53 Melville was recalling this from his much more troubled early seventeenth-century perspective, explaining the often intertwined accounts of joy and sorrow, which mirror the emotionally powerful but complicated feelings which were experienced as part of the personal spiritual journey. He went out of his way to record the positive and joyous stages in the ecclesiastical narrative, even if the overall tone is at best bittersweet. Although Melville primarily records his own responses, it is significant that a similar emotional register is ascribed to the wider public experience of church politics. This reinforces the suggestion that emotion is present for more fundamental reasons than for Melville to simply record how he felt about things. Following his anxious breakdown after the fall of the Ruthven regime, prayers, and sermons for his cause ‘moved the peiple verie mikle [very much], and gallit [galled] the court’.54 The positive affective response to preaching and prayer by the ‘peiple’ as opposed to

50 For example see JMAD, 360, 507; UECRC, La.iii.335, no pagination, 5th page of True Narratioune section. 51 JMAD, 127. 52 JMAD, 226–7. 53 JMAD, 228. See also JMAD, 17, which refers to a ‘happie and golden tyme’. 54 JMAD, 145; see also 22 for the ‘heavie mean [moaning/mourning] and pitiful

regrat’ of ‘men in all esteatts’ on the news of the assassination of Regent Moray in 1570.

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the court serves to reinforce the binary sense of the good and bad sides. Similarly, in the previous decade, the appointment of unworthy ministers to bishoprics during the regency of the Earl of Morton had ‘greivit the hart of the man of God to the dead [death]’.55 In accounts of the early seventeenth-century tribulations of the presbyterian cause, an admonition in a legal case ‘maide all the heireris astonischit, and their hairis to stand’ and a prayer ‘bred great motioune in the heartis of all the heareres’.56 The representation of a wider public experiencing strong emotional reactions was not confined to Melville’s specific domestic ecclesiastical agenda, with the response to news of the Armada being a more general example of public displays of emotion (‘sounding war the siches and sobbes, and abounding was the teares at that Fast and Generall Assemblie keipit [held] at Edinbruche’).57 But there was a consistent invocation of a popular emotional engagement with the presbyterian cause which supported its authenticity. This connection is further suggested in a later letter from 1613, where Melville recorded how a minister of ‘notable gifts’, John Straton, yielded to the Bishop of Moray and promptly fell into ‘a wounderfull rage and phrenesie [frenzy]’ and died six days later without ‘release or confort’. In a fascinating phrase, apparently ‘the wholl people ascryves it to the dealling with the Bischope against his hart’.58 We would be unwise to assume that the entire population who were aware of this event subscribed to Melville and his allies’ interpretation, but more important is the suggestion that there was a plausible public attribution of the mental illness and death to Straton’s betrayal of his cause, and that for him to do this was framed as acting ‘against his hart’. The level and intensity of emotional language is fairly consistent in the main Autobiography. But there are some chronological trends. Some

55 JMAD, 32. The ‘man of God’ here seems to refer to a generic good Christian. 56 JMAD, 625, 669. The exclamation mark after ‘stand’ in the published edition is not

present in the key manuscript editions, and so has been omitted. UECRC, MS MEL 3, p. 65 [pagination mine] reads ‘and ther heartis to stand’, and the passage does not occur within the surviving portion of Melville’s UECRC, La.iii335; however, UECRC, MS Dc. 4.10, p. 69 has ‘hairis to stand’, which is also the more logical reading. 57 JMAD, 261. Similar outpourings of tears, and hearts melting, were described by Melville early in 1613 following the fasting for the death of Prince Henry Frederick: EUCRC, MS Dc 6.45, p. 317. 58 UECRC, MS Dc 6.45, p. 322. For Straton see Scott, Fasti, vii, 421.

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of the variation in the extent of overtly emotional language and experience is most likely related to the simple ebbs and flows both of church politics and Melville’s life: for example, the calmer and less depressing years of 1590 and 1591 are described more briefly and comparatively neutrally. It would be dangerous to assume too much about changes in Melville’s actual feelings and experiences from these patterns. There was however more frequently strong emotional expression in the description of the earlier years, and especially the later 1570s and 1580s. The mid1580s were naturally a particularly dramatic period for Melville and for the Kirk. While the events of the mid-1590s were still tumultuous, some high profile incidents including ones which involved Melville are not discussed in ways which place such central emphasis on emotional responses, such as the negotiations with King James and the incidents at Falkland Palace.59 There is still, of course, use of emotional frameworks to communicate the story, such as Melville and his colleagues being ‘greivit at the hart’ with developments in 1596–1597 and shortly after experiencing ‘grait greiff of mynd’.60 Affairs closer to home, including the murder of his friend James Smith, attract more emotional discussion in these years.61 But the slight difference in tone may also result from a combination of the greater emotional heat of adolescence, youth and emergence into public affairs in the earlier years, and the formative memories of hope and disaster and the rapid turnarounds in fortunes in the mid-1580s. Moreover, as mentioned above, at the turn of the century and the end of the main Autobiography, Melville explicitly recorded his weariness at public affairs, having been ‘compelled of conscience to continow with a mair heavie and greivus fascherie [trouble/bother], labour, and pean [pain], bathe of mynd and body’, and indeed beseeched his brethren to relieve him of duties which brought him to ‘extream danger of my lyff…unles yie wald have my skine’.62 Nevertheless, following his severe illness in 1601, he closes with verse including a pledge ‘to play an honest

59 JMAD, 316–7, 324–6. 60 JMAD, 403, 405; for context see above, ‘Biographical and Historical Survey’. 61 JMAD, 424–7; see below, ‘Friendship’. 62 JMAD, 488, 493–4.

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part’ in the struggle.63 The ‘Continuation’ of the Autobiography, the True Narratioune, completed in 1610 and continuing the narrative, is written in a more historical and less autobiographical style. As an account of the ‘doolfull decay’ of the Kirk, it is far from devoid of emotional language and emotive descriptions of the events, such as the ‘teiris’ shed for the ministers imprisoned at Blackness, ‘the great occean of our sorow and greiff’ in an address from Scots ministers to the English Privy Council, and the ‘gryt hart-breke of the godly’, but it is less personally rich than the main Autobiography.64 It was suggested by the editor of the published edition of the Autobiography that the different style and personal distance were adopted for expediency in case of reprisals against Melville or his family in subsequent years.65 But the references to himself in the third person would have been unlikely to misdirect any informed reader as to the author’s identity, then or now.66 Moreover, Melville’s other later writings, perhaps most notably The Black Bastel, were among his most emotionally expressive in their condemnation of what he saw as the lamentable state of the Kirk, and his poetry and surviving correspondence from the years after the Glasgow Assembly of 1605 and the following year’s exile also confirm a strong ongoing emotional engagement with ecclesiastical affairs.67 There are also more substantial passages in the True Narratioune comprising transcripts of ecclesiastical documents and correspondence, reflecting its character as something closer to a chronicle. Whatever the reasons, it is written in a style which lends itself less to the rich personal expression of the main Autobiography, and especially the earlier years of the struggles. Although it is not possible to state 63 JMAD, 500. Melville’s ill health would continue in the years between the close of the main Autobiography and his later exile, as evidenced in Presbytery minutes: see for example Smith, ‘Presbytery of St Andrews’, 391, 419. 64 JMAD, 506, 531, 626, 697. 65 JMAD, 627n. 66 JMAD, 654, 666, 689. 67 Melville, The Black Bastel; see also below, ‘Melville’s Emotional Language’. His

manuscript poetry from the later years includes continued personal laments on the ecclesiastical situation, (sometimes directly personal, as in the lines ‘thoch I bee be Bischopes sair [sore] detested/I perceave my Christ does me approve’), NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 2v. He also wrote dramatically to his uncle Andrew in ‘grief, shame and confusion’ at the state of the Kirk: M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 322; another example is the end of a letter in 1610 conveying both tears and the swelling of the heart: UECRC, MS Dc 6.45, p. 163.

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definitively how far the chronological patterns reflect differing emotional experiences or perspectives at different times, it is more likely that the lessened role of personal emotional expression in the later writing stems from differing styles, structure, and purpose than from any reduction in emotional engagement with religious politics. Emotional language and expression were fundamental both to Melville’s experience, and to his interpretation, of church politics during the controversial years of the late sixteenth century. And indeed, although his focus was naturally on the motivations and experiences of his own side, it may be no coincidence that when allusion is made to enemies, they are presented as repressing the Kirk for motivations driven by the less desirable emotion of anger: ‘thaise indeavores so enraged the Papistes and politictes’.68 Church politics were deeply felt by James Melville, and a key part of any attempt to understand his worldview and emotional experiences. While we should not assume that he was typical, this suggests that something similar may have been the case for many other Protestant clergymen, at least. Beyond this, the force with which he records and utilises emotion reveals fruitful avenues for further research into the wider use of emotion in ecclesiastical and political discourse in Scotland.69

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the centrality of emotion in Melville’s experience and representation of religious affairs, from the intimate details of his personal spiritual journey from childhood to ministry, and the emotional impact, and sometimes turmoil, of his involvement in wider church politics and public affairs. Melville himself, of course, might not have recognised this chapter’s structural distinction between the two aspects, and as we have seen, they were often closely intertwined strands in the fundamental narrative of God’s providential shaping of Melville’s life. Overall, the way in which Melville describes his religious experiences suggests a need for historians to engage with the emotional dynamics not just of personal piety, but of all aspects of religious life and conflict in the aftermath of the Scottish Reformation.

68 JMAD, 507–8. 69 For a study developing this theme in the covenanting context, see Langley,

‘Deportment’.

CHAPTER 3

Social Relationships

Abstract This chapter explores Melville’s experience and representation of emotion in his interpersonal relationships. This is divided into three sections, exploring firstly various family relationships starting with his sister and uncle, through marriage, to fatherhood. The second section explores the (sometimes overlapping) subject of friendship, especially via his account of particularly important relationships with fellow ministers, and as with the discussion of fatherhood, bereavement. The third section explores his emotional connection and bond with his congregations. Keywords Family · Marriage · Parenthood · Friendship · Death · Ministry

Introduction In this chapter, we turn to the emotional elements and dynamics of Melville’s personal relationships with others. This will involve three distinct, but sometimes overlapping circles, all of which were significant in his representation of emotional experiences. These are his relationships with his family, including parents, siblings, wives, and children; his friends in ministerial circles and his local communities; and his flock as a parish minister. As we shall see, and as almost goes without saying, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0_3

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his discussions of all three are deeply connected to his religious life and worldview. But they were also significant aspects of his life experience in their own right, and they provide opportunities to explore a wider emotional spectrum, different emotional registers, and ultimately to open up fertile ground for thematically broader discussion in the emotional history of early modern Scots.

Family Melville’s Autobiography includes strikingly rich emotional expression when recording family relationships. While this might at first seem to be an obvious feature of autobiographical writing, contemporary spiritual life-writing could be brief or brusque in discussing family affairs.1 Interestingly, Melville’s siblings rather than parents are the best starting point for considering this. Isobel, the sister who read him the pamphlet on stipends which upset them both so much is the figure in his early life who receives the fondest recollections.2 This was often linked to his religious awakening: she read and sang the Bible to him as a child, and he loved her ‘exceiding deirlie’, a bond further emphasised by his recollection of trying to send her gifts if they were ‘worthie of hir’.3 This was in keeping with a wider tradition of older siblings providing spiritual guidance to younger siblings.4 As he records it, she was fonder of him than all the other siblings, and when he broke her trust in stealing some silver from her chest, she responded with such ‘soar threatnings’ and ‘sweit and loving admonition and exhortations’ that he abstained from theft afterwards.5 The connection between this sister and Melville’s memory and understanding of his spiritual development is made clear. The close bond is related to the fact that Melville’s own mother, remembered in the family for ‘godlines, honestie, vertew and affection toward thame’

1 See for example Stewart, Oxford History of Life-Writing, 135, 187. 2 See above, ‘Religious Politics and Emotion’. 3 JMAD, 18–9; K. Barclay, ‘Family and Household’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, 246. 4 B. Capp, The Ties That Bind: Siblings, Family and Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2018), 113. 5 JMAD, 18–9.

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died in his first year of life.6 When Isobel herself died in 1574, making it a ‘maist dulfull’ [most sorrowful] time, Melville records that he ‘lossit my naturall mother the second tyme’.7 Furthermore, the sister of a local minister was recorded as a ‘godlie and honest matron…wha often rememberit [reminded] me of my mother, and was a verie loving mother to us’, and in another household where he boarded the wife ‘also was ane [one] of my mothers’.8 Melville’s attribution of motherly qualities to Isobel and other godly women in his early life was partly an understandable response to the very early loss of his mother. There was also a sense of surrogate parenthood in his relationship with his more famous uncle, Andrew Melville, even though James’ father lived until his late teens. James’ view of his father was rather stern and forbidding, in some ways reminiscent of the wider trope of Protestant reformers all the way back to Luther having troubled or tense relationships with authoritarian fathers who must be obeyed.9 There is brief reference to paternal affection, albeit in a story told to James later in life about his father playing with and teasing him on the floor when he was four or five years old (Melville would be placed on his back, unable to rise, and apparently said ‘I am sa fatt I may nocht geang [go/move]’).10 James wanted to pursue the ‘scholar’s lyf’, but his father was reluctant, and ‘held us in sic aw, that we durst nocht reasone with him, bot his will was neidfull obedience to us’. When James did begin studies and was found to have ‘sum beginning’ of learning, he clearly found great significance in the fact that his father ‘exceidinglie rejoysit, and uttered sweittar affection to me than ever before’.11 As he desired to become a minister against his father’s will, he even records leaving a portion of a sermon he had written for his father to find as if by chance.12 This incident provides some genuine narrative suspense in the story, but

6 JMAD, 15. 7 JMAD, 28. 8 JMAD, 16, 29. 9 Mullett, Martin Luther, 44, 47, 50; A. Ganoczy, ‘Calvin’s Life’, in D. McKim (ed.),

The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (Cambridge, 2004), 3–4; B. Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, 2009), 8, 18. 10 JMAD, 16. 11 JMAD, 23–5. 12 JMAD, 37.

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also helps to suggest the intensity of the troubled relationship with his father and the ministry, further developed in an extremely vivid premonition in a dream of his father’s acceptance of James as an aspirant minister and then sudden death. This dream involved his father coming to him after he had taught at the exercise, taking James ‘in his armes, and kissing me’, and then falling back over ‘sa that his feit stak out stiff and dead’. James’ father apparently died that very night, as revealed two days later.13 Whether or not this was literally true, or the coincidence of nights and memories retrospectively developed in James’ writing of the Autobiography many years later, what is significant is that he remembered and saw great meaning in these youthful tensions with his father over his ambition for a ministerial career. This also helps to explain the significance of Andrew Melville. Before they met, news of Andrew’s supposed death ‘twitched [touched] my hart wounder soar [wondrously sore]’, and when that news was disproved James’ ‘hart was exceiding glade’.14 This sets the tone for James’ early relationship with Andrew, who ultimately sets him free to pursue the ministry, and James is even signed over to Andrew as his ‘sone and servant’ before his father’s death.15 And in his early career, James presents his decisions as being ‘moved with the lov and reverence of my uncle’, suggesting an emotional bond and obedience to Andrew that was lacking from his relationship with his father.16 This bond endured through their lives, and indeed the same blurring of paternal and avuncular language can be found in greetings and closings of their correspondence in the late 1600s and early 1610s.17 However, once James was established as a minister and presbyterian voice in his own right in the later 1580s and 1590s, the relationship was not so central to Melville’s main narrative, and indeed Andrew does not dominate James’ emotional landscape or overshadow the community of ministers and friends which as we shall see

13 JMAD, 50–1. 14 JMAD, 30. 15 JMAD, 45. 16 JMAD, 83. 17 See for example, UECRC, MS Dc 6.45, pp. 8, 51 (James writing ‘patruo suo plurimum observando imo in Christo patri charissimo’; Andrew writing ‘Vale mi fili charissime’).

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were extremely significant to him.18 But in establishing his early spiritual, and academic-clerical development, James’ sister and uncle, rather than his parents, were the key family figures and sources for emotional recollection and discussion in the Autobiography. Melville’s first marriage was in 1583, to Elizabeth, daughter of the minister John Durie.19 He refers to her in the early stages of the Autobiography as his ‘happie halff marrow’: the term half-marrow as a synonym for spouse does not necessarily have any particularly affectionate connotations, being used also in technical or administrative contexts, but the alliterative prefix suggests Melville’s warmth towards her, as does a later reference to her as his ‘sweit loving new-maried wyff’, and ‘dearlie beloved’.20 The Autobiography does not focus on everyday or household life, and she is not a central character in the narrative, but there are several significant references to Elizabeth which reinforce the particular connection between marriage and Melville’s spiritual journey and ecclesiastical affairs.21 Their wedding coincided with a General Assembly, held in the optimistic context of the success of the Ruthven coup in the spring of 1583. The Assembly and marriage were so connected in Melville’s memory that he introduces the account by saying that ‘At that Assemblie I maried my wyff’. He refers to the ‘blessing of the best breithring of the Kirk’, indicating the importance of the wider godly ministerial community to the event, and also uses unusually formal and extensive reverential language in comparison to previous references to God, in recording that ‘the quhilk [which], my blessed God of Heavin be blessit for’. The repetition of ‘blessed’ in the line particularly stands out in comparison to previous sections. There is some praise for his wife as ‘grait helpe and comfort in my calling, even in the middes of her heavie disease and impotencie’, with this reference to her later ongoing ill health helping to personalise the fairly formulaic concept of wives as ‘helpe and comfort’

18 McCallum, ‘“Sone and Servant”’, 207–9. 19 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’. 20 JMAD, 7, 168, 323; DSL, ‘Half-marrow’; see also Ryrie, Being Protestant, 89, for the particular significance placed on the idea of ‘sweetness’ by contemporaries. 21 The key account of the experience of early modern marriage in Scotland, albeit covering elite marriages in the period after 1650, is K. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 2011).

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to ministers.22 Crucially, Melville goes on to set out a striking reason why his marriage is both central to his happiness, and also not a central subject of discussion in the text: whowbeit, the haill [whole] course of my lyff sen syne [since] has bein, in outward appeirance, bot a scholl [school] of afflictiones, yit (alas for thanksfulnes) and [an] maist halsome and happie scholl, with a mixture of als [as] monie [many] provisiones, preservationes, privat profits, pleasures, joyes, and consolationnes, as ever anie of the secret annes [ones] of the Lord receavit.23

The outward ‘afflictiones’ of public life naturally dominate his autobiographical writing, although unlike many early modern autobiographers, he was not ‘completely silent’ on companionship in marriage.24 Recalling his marriage later in life appears to have prompted a more joyful reminiscence. This reverie is clearly considered rather than off-hand, as the carefully alliterative presentation demonstrates, and it serves to reinforce a sense of worldly trial combined with providential private blessing as befits a member of the elect. The account of Melville’s first meeting with his future wife four years earlier in 1579 also reinforces the spiritual narrative. Previously, he had been ‘of nature verie loving and amorus’, although thanks to God’s grace and a certain ‘bashful nature’, he had avoided temptation and ‘was nocht overcome nor miscaried be na [by no] woman, offensivlie to his Kirk, nor grievuslie to my conscience, in blotting of my bodie’.25 When he stayed in her household, ‘affection enterit verie extreamlie betwix that gentlewoman and me’, and only through ‘manie sear [many sore] battels and greivus tentatiounes’ did he remain chaste and eventually God ‘put in my hart a purpose to seik and use that holie and lawfull remeid [remedy] of

22 JMAD, 136; see also J. Nugent and L. Rae Stauffer, ‘Scotland’s “Holy Households”: Wives and Children of Reformed Ministers’, in Langley, McMillan and Newton (eds), The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland, 73–6. 23 JMAD, 136–7. ‘Secret’ here suggests close or ‘privy’ ones rather than the concept of secrecy. An exclamation mark after ‘alas’ has been removed since it is not in the original manuscript: NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 99. 24 Pollman, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 35. 25 JMAD, 79.

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mariage’.26 God’s providential gift of resistance to temptation is placed in, and acts through, the heart, and indeed Melville then records that he settled ‘my hart ther’, and ‘put all uther out of my hart’.27 The other significant element of this passage is its timing: this was 1579, and the only other substantial discussion covering that year is of the deeply joyous and harmonious Assembly of that year. In parallel to the association of the marriage itself with the 1583 General Assembly, Melville chooses to use 1579 to foreground and combine the zealous and unified Assembly discussing presbyteries and university reform, and God’s providential placing of the commitment to marry in his heart. This is further evidence of the integration of emotions relating to the family with the spiritual and ecclesiastical narrative, as well as a sense of nostalgia from the viewpoint of writing at the start of the seventeenth century.28 Indeed, by the early 1600s, it was not only the Kirk that was suffering in Melville’s view: his wife was also unwell by this time. Another dreampremonition informs us of this: in 1600, around the time of the Gowrie conspiracy and a tsunami which could also be read as a portent, Melville ‘dreamed my wyff was dead’ and then ‘with grait heavines of hairt’ mourned for her even after he knew her to be alive. She was thereafter ‘strucken with sic infirmitie, that sche could nocht be a wyff to mie’.29 Their last child had been born around 1598, and she died towards the end of the decade.30 Melville married his second wife, Deborah Clerk, in 1612, two years after the end of the ‘Continuation’ of the Autobiography (the True Narratioune).31 It has been suggested that the ‘alluring young female figure’ in Melville’s poetry at the end of the 1600s was reflective of the turn towards

26 JMAD, 79–80. 27 JMAD, 80. The next year it comforted him, when facing sadness relating to the

fortunes of his friends at Glasgow, to find her growing in religion: JMAD. 84. 28 This connection between emotions relating to the family and the wider spiritual and ecclesiastical narrative is also suggested by the choice not to use significantly emotional language when describing other developments in the family, such as the marriage of two of Melville’s sisters on the same day in 1573, when other than news of a battle dampening the feasting, there does not seem to have been any significant connections to wider affairs or Melville’s personal development: JMAD, 28. 29 JMAD, 486. 30 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’. Melville himself was also very ill in 1601: JMAD, 489, 494. 31 Kirk, ‘Melville, James’.

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marrying Clerk, nearly forty years younger than Melville.32 Whether or not this was the case, it is clear that Melville was keen to defend and advocate for his marrying her (rather than an older widow), in contrast to the preferences of his uncle and others on account of the age difference.33 He was ‘resolved to end my days, sooner or later, in honourable wedlock’, and argued ‘is it not eligible to have a faithful and affectionate wife, if it were only to watch by one’s death-bed and to close one’s eyes’.34 As his intent was to persuade his sceptical bachelor uncle of the advisability of the match, the emphasis on affection, rather than simply honourability, suggests how important this element was to James. Indeed Andrew’s response noted, tellingly, that James’ words ‘betray affection’, and further claimed that ‘you are carried away by your affections’, which in return prompted a sharper and more direct counterargument from James: ‘Nor do I deny that I am in love; but it is legitimate, holy, chaste, sober love’.35 The discussions, which culminated in Andrew conceding the case, suggest both the high value placed by Melville on the state of marriage, and his specific affection for his chosen bride, later referred to as his ‘only earthly solace in my solitude and exile’.36 There was also a softening of tone in the letters following this, and in subsequent correspondence about other matters, there are warm greetings and sometimes particularly affectionate messages routinely conveyed to and from her in subsequent correspondence with Andrew.37 These years are sadly not covered in the Autobiography’s personal narrative, and thus we are unable to answer the intriguing question of how Melville experienced marriage to Clerk and how he might have understood and represented it within the spiritual and ecclesiastical schema of the Autobiography’s earlier narrative. The final family experience to be considered is parenthood, which provides further evidence of emotional intensity and expression in Melville’s writing, as well as the integration of that emotion with religious experiences and messages. His first son was born in exile in 1585, and looked weak at first, leading the midwife to apply a hot cloth (a detail 32 Yeoman, ‘James Melville and the Covenant of Grace’, 580–1. 33 M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 295–9. 34 M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 296. 35 M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 297–8. 36 M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 299, 316. 37 EUCRC, MS Dc 6.45, pp. 155–6, 173, 196, 309, 320–1.

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with the ring of true recollection), and leading Melville to associate Ephraim’s survival with the ‘cair and providence of God towards me’. Melville also instructs his son directly in this passage that his purpose is to ‘sett him selff to the knawlage and service of that God wha thus brought him from the wombe’.38 It was clearly a strong memory and an excellent case study in providence and vocation for Melville, but also an opportunity for him to contrast himself with his own father’s forbidding approach to his ministerial ambitions. Building on the distinction which Melville had earlier emphasised between his outward tribulations and happy home life, he makes some passing references in 1586 to how the troubles of his time ‘haid almost maid me forget’ to record in the Autobiography his second son Andro, born in St Andrews in July 1586. He similarly claimed that that year he ‘haid skarslie lasor [scarcely leisure] to think’ about the two-year old Ephraim.39 This seems more likely to be a narrative device to emphasise the tribulations, or a simple stylistic exaggeration, than evidence that he actually forgot about his children, but it serves as a reminder that family life and familial emotions tend to be recorded when there is a special significance to the spiritual or ecclesiastical narrative. The birth of his son John, in 1595, appears to have had that special significance, because of the moral lesson it provided and for emotional reasons because it came after parental bereavement. A detailed addition to the manuscript, added retrospectively and with rare use of a fairly simple but faintly decorative line to enclose the text, records the child being born around 11 pm on 27 March, and that in contrast to a sickly and now deceased daughter, Margaret, ‘a sarie las [sorry lass] that never leuche [laughed]’, God had now given him ‘a pleasand boy’, who ‘was a pastyme and pleasour’. As well as providing a lesson in patience and forbearance, this seems to have been a particularly fond recollection for Melville, and he went on to insert details of the baptism, which was performed by Melville’s father-in-law John Durie and represented a hopeful note and the promise of growing grace, including as signified by the choice of the same forename as Durie.40 38 JMAD, 220–1. 39 JMAD, 251, 255. 40 JMAD, 323+n; NLS, Adv. Ms., 34.4.15, p. 236. For the significance of the baptism of sons for Reformed ministers, see Nugent and Stauffer, ‘Scotland’s “Holy Households”’, 75; Nugent, ‘Reformed Masculinity’, 41–2, and for the Scottish ceremony’s greater emphasis on parents than in English equivalents, M. Hollander, ‘Baptism and

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These happy recollections of parenthood were, as has been hinted and as wider patterns in evidence and discussion of positive and negative emotions might lead us to expect, outweighed by grief.41 His second son died at the age of two in 1588, and the lengthy section recording this includes a verse epitaph for Andro. He appears to feel the need to justify, perhaps performatively, the discussion, saying that he ‘can nocht forget my particular, seing that it is my speciall purpose to recompt the gratius [recount the gracious] working of my God with me’.42 Significantly, he does not preface most of the other more personal material with this sort of disclaimer, although in the case of another bereavement, he states that ‘I can nocht omit unrememberit to His praise’.43 This may suggest that it was particularly deeply felt and therefore necessary to signpost the providential lesson more explicitly. God ‘corrected me sweitlie’ in taking Andro, but ‘recompenced’ him with another son born later in 1588 and given the same name, and ‘sa the Lord taks, the Lord giffes, blessed be the nam of the Lord for ever!’44 This much is conventional and even formulaic, and although this should not imply any less emotion was involved, the almost liturgical tone and cadence of the final line sets it apart from what follows. He goes on to recall that the bern was fallon [very] beautifull, loving, and mirrhie [merry], and seimed to be of a fyne sanguine constitution till a quarter efter he was speaned [weaned]; bot syne [soon], wither be wormes or a hectik [feverish] consumption, I knaw nocht, bot his flesche and cullor fealed, and be the space of a quarter of yeir consumed and dwyned [wasted] away, keiping alwayes the sweitest and pleasandest ei [eye] that could be in annes [one’s] heid.45

the Social Construction of Fatherhood in Early Modern Edinburgh’, in E. Ewan and J. Nugent (eds), Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Aldershot, 2008), 70–1. 41 A. Fletcher, Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (New Haven, 2008), 81; D.M. McMahon, ‘Finding Joy in the History of Emotions’, in S. Matt and P. Stearns (eds), Doing Emotions History (Urbano, IL, 2014), 104–5. 42 JMAD, 269. 43 JMAD, 309. 44 JMAD, 269. 45 JMAD, 270.

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The prose becomes far more personal, bodily, and vivid in this section. This continues as Melville, despite having prepared himself for the inevitable bereavement by sitting Andro at the end of the table at meals, ‘mervelit at my awin hart that was sa urened [pained] and moved with it, sa that yit, when I wrot this, I was nocht frie of the bowndings of the bowelles of that naturall affection’.46 Melville does not typically refer to his feelings at the time of writing, and still less this deeply embodied and severe reliving of grief. There is a brief lesson derived from this about how much greater still must be God the father’s love for humanity, which is immediately followed by a return to Andro as the subject of the writing with the statement ‘he was my first propyne and hansell [gifts] to heavin’, and an anecdote of one of his fine doves dying on the same day, which is necessary to contextualise the line in the verse epitaph ‘with dowes to heavin thow flew’.47 The selection of verse as a genre is itself indicative of a desire to express emotion directly, and was repeated in an epitaph for Margaret in 1593, the daughter who never laughed, and from whose persona her epitaph is written, urging her mother to ‘lament for me no more’.48 The rare selfreferential turn to Melville’s own feelings ‘when I wrot this’ is echoed this time by an equally rare direct address to the reader: ‘if thow be a pater that reids it, thow wilt apardone me. If nocht suspend thy censure til thow be a father’.49 Even considering the subject matter, the section is one of the most direct and dynamic in its style, and in its degree of selfreference. It would be tempting to suggest that cases of such intense grief saw the emotional emphasis in the writing overtake the main narrative more than in other places, but we should be wary of this temptation. This is partly because of the danger that the more universal experience of grief resonates and connects with modern experiences more directly and 46 The absence of any obvious visual evidence of emotion in the handwriting of this passage is possibly explained by the likelihood that this was a writing-up of a previous draft: NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 199. 47 JMAD, 270. 48 D.G. Barnes, ‘Poetry’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions; JMAD, 309. 49 JMAD, 270–1. Melville attributed the motif about suspending judgement until one

is a parent to Agesilaus, although in that case Agesilaus was referring to potential judgement or embarrassment about playing with children rather than parental bereavement and emotional verse, so it was a very personalised and therefore meaningful allusion: Plutarch’s Lives: The Translation called Dryden’s, rev. A.H. Clough (5 vols, Boston, MA, 1906), iv, 31.

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intuitively than other potentially equally significant emotional expressions relating to religious experience.50 But it is also vital to remember that for someone with Melville’s worldview, the religious message to be drawn and the personal psychological experience were certainly not in tension, and indeed reinforced each other.51 And similarly, although grief can stand out on the page as one of the most powerful emotional experiences, as we have seen, the key message and narrative of providence and Melville’s spiritual development was also present in much happier circumstances in his family life. In various ways, then, family was the focus for significant emotional recollection and discussion in Melville’s writing. Moreover, some of the strongest emotional expression relating to the family came when there was a direct connection to Melville’s religious experiences. This might once have been seen as evidence of a narrow or less rounded Protestant emotional life. From the standpoint of recent advances in the historiography of emotion, and particularly the goal of understanding how very different societies understood and experienced emotion, however, it speaks to the powerful and integrated emotional experience of family and godliness. This section has therefore not only uncovered the ways in which Melville experienced and felt family life, but also suggested another angle via which the emotional history of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Scotland could be expanded.

Friendship It should not be assumed that family connections were necessarily the most important or most emotionally charged relationships discussed in Melville’s writing. This is partly because of some key connections and overlaps between his family and wider community of friends. For example, when travelling to Montrose with his father-in-law, Durie’s horse fell in a stream and Melville dramatically rescued him, and the incident seems to be presented as serving to open up the friendship. Melville introduces him to ‘all our frinds’ in the areas, and Durie found them ‘thairefter 50 S. Broomhall, ‘Emotions in the Household’, in Broomhall (ed), Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900, 5–6. 51 A. Ryrie, ‘Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality’, in Barclay, Reynolds and Rawnsley (eds), Death, Emotion and Childhood; see also Yeoman, ‘James Melville and the Covenant of Grace’, 576–7.

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ever loving and frindlie’ and thus the marriage was a ‘speciall providence of God’ to Durie.52 Melville’s wife is later recorded as deeply grieved by their friend James Lawson’s death: she ‘doolit [mourned/lamented] and bursted’ to the extent that a miscarriage was feared.53 In a poem James referred to Andrew Melville as ‘My maister, uncle, and my friend so kinde’.54 And as we have seen, at Melville’s marriage the blessing and closeness of the brethren of the ministry was emphasised.55 So, quite naturally, there were blurry lines and close resonances between familial and friendship connections.56 And as recent scholarship on the previously neglected emotional element of early modern friendship suggests, these could be relationships charged with meaning and personal significance.57 Moreover, there is much evidence in the Autobiography to suggest that friendship more widely conceived was extremely important to James’ emotional landscape. This is partly apparent in the specific individual friends who are selected for specific recollection and extended discussion. In the account of his nervous breakdown discussed in the previous chapter, James presented his recovery stemming from ‘a speciall loving frind of myne’ who knocked on the door, comforted him, ‘and convoyed me ham to St Androis. This was Andro Wod of Streavithie’.58 The additional short sentence to name the friend retrospectively at the end of the passage has the effect of emphasising the significance of the individual concerned. Other special friends of Melville included the laird of Aiton, recorded in the account of Melville’s final illness and deathbed as ‘ane of his dear acquentance’, and whose visit ‘affected him sua [so] with joy’ that the laird decided to stay the night with Melville even though he lived nearby.59 A marginal insertion emphasises that the minister Thomas Smeton was ‘a speciall blessing of my guid god, for me in particular’, and

52 JMAD, 139. 53 JMAD, 220. ‘Our Lawson’ (‘Lawsonii nostri’) was also fondly remembered by

Andrew Melville in a later letter to James: UECRC, MS Dc. 6.45, p. 65. 54 NLS, Adv Ms 19.2.7, f. 43r. 55 JMAD, 136–7. 56 Tadmor, Family and Friends, 167. 57 L. Powell, ‘The Emotional Landscape of Sir Thomas Parkyns of Bunny, Notting-

hamshire: Friendship’, Midland History, 41 (2016), 184–200 at 186. 58 JMAD, 145. 59 JMAD, lx.

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was later ascribed quite specific positive virtues and personality: ‘nocht rustic nor auster, bot sweit and affable in companie’, and preferring to walk ‘on fut’ most often. James recalled accompanying him on foot, and that ‘He lovit me exceiding weill, and wald at parting thrust my head in his bosome and kis me’.60 This suggests an effort and an intent to convey the specifics of a personal relationship. Ministers like Smeton, John Durie (and, as highlighted in the margin his ‘maist sure and faithfull brother and friend’ Robert Durie) were unsurprisingly prominent in Melville’s circle of acquaintances, but by no means exclusively nor given extra emotional weight, as the laird of Aiton, and (as we shall see) Melville’s ‘deir frind’ the merchant James Smith indicate.61 Female friendships were apparent too, although perhaps disproportionately if unsurprisingly with those linked to the ministry such as the widow of James Lawson who was ‘my speciall acquentance and confort in Chryst, from the deathe of hir husband to hir lyve’s end’.62 It is important not to adopt too simplistic a binary categorisation of ideas of friendship between the functional or instrumental understandings of scholars such as Lawrence Stone, and more recent arguments for emotional value in friendship.63 The two appear to overlap in instances such as the substantial sum of 500 merks to assist with the publication costs of Melville’s Spirituall Propine ‘quhilk God provydit be the motion of a maist godlie and loving frind’s hart’, and the Berwick community where Melville simultaneously ‘gat verie grait friendschipe’ and financial help from ‘divers guid men and weimen of the town’.64 This overlap may be less frequently mentioned as a result of the autobiographical genre, which tends to downplay practical and financial business in contrast to the correspondence which often forms the basis of studies of emotion in early modern personal relationships.65 But beyond the instrumental 60 NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p 47; JMAD, 61, 75. 61 NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 165; JMAD, 423. 62 JMAD, 220. 63 Tadmor, Family and Friends, 167–215; Powell, ‘Emotional Landscape’, 199. 64 JMAD, 171, 443. 65 For an overview, see C. James, ‘Letters’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions; specific examples include G. Schneider, ‘Affecting Correspondence: Body, Behaviour and the Textualisation of Emotion in Early Modern English Letters’, Prose Studies, 23, 3 (2000); Powell, ‘Emotional Landscapes’; L. Pollock, ‘Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 567–90.

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element in friendship, a really substantial part of Melville’s experience of friendship is the overlap with his religious experience. The importance of godliness in friendship was presented in pious theoretical terms in a short poem on the theme: ‘[Friend]ship first must have the ground in God… Fals frind to Christ shall never be trew to man’.66 But it is more directly and practically captured in the emphasis placed on the godliness and virtues of his friends such as Smeton, or other friends in ministerial circles such as Robert Bruce, Robert Durie and Thomas Buchanan. Buchanan is remembered and added to the two Roberts in a marginal note on the manuscript, and Melville also added the phrase ‘Mr Robert Bruce’ in the margin: this was clearly for emphasis as Bruce was already present in the main text, and the phrase was added with larger and more spaced lettering.67 While most of Melville’s surviving correspondence is with his uncle Andrew, letters to friends such as Aaron Capel refer to their virtue (‘vir optime et amice integerrime’) and to the godliness or holiness of their friendship (‘sancte amicitiae’), as well as joy on receiving correspondence from these honest friends, of whom Robert Durie was an enduring example.68 More generally, we have seen the nostalgic recollection of the community of brethren gathered, involving ‘exceiding guid fallowschipe’ around the harmonious General Assembly discussed earlier.69 And when Melville returned optimistically to Scotland from exile, it was with ‘swelling upe be hope, inquenchable joy…and grait welcoming with manie guidmorrowes’, the final phrase serving to associate the greeting of friends with the joyous recollection of more hopeful times for the Kirk. Although these hopes were quenched, literally and figuratively, when they got to Linlithgow, Melville then recalled being unified with his colleagues, and their consciences ‘maide us to keipe togidder in a deceyit house, that nather helde out wind nor weit [rain]’.70 The experience of friendship was important in times of both joy and tribulation. Beyond these events in church politics, an association between friendship and Melville’s spiritual progress is suggested by an incident when while preaching in St Andrews 66 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 3v. 67 JMAD, 146–7, 271; NLS, Adv. MS., 34.4.15, p. 105. 68 UECRC, MS Dc 6.45, pp. 191 (Capel), 304 (Durie); see also for example pp. 287–9. 69 JMAD, 79. 70 JMAD, 227, 229.

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relatively early in his career, he remembered a fellow scholar from his student days who had gone mad and died in France, and ‘when I beheld out of the pulpit in the scholles, and rememberit the mercifull working of my God with mie, my breist could nocht contein my breathe nor my eis teares’.71 This suggests that the sense of vocation, the specific location of the pulpit and the view of where he had sat with his friend combined to produce a particularly powerful and embodied emotive response, with shortness of breath as well as the more common experience of tears. These themes of close relationships with specific friends, intense and embodied emotional responses to the loss of friends, and a particular emotional resonance when there was a connection to wider events or the struggles of the Kirk, are most richly captured and intertwined in Melville’s account of his murdered friend, the merchant James Smith. Melville records how Smith was murdered by ‘four deboshit [debauched] young limmers’, or rogues, incited by the ‘craftie misrewlars of the citie’: this was related to a complicated feud and political conflict in St Andrews, in which Melville and the presbytery were on Smith’s side, and the town government on the other side.72 This is followed by one of the most extended and dramatic accounts of a personal relationship. Melville begins by saying that ‘Thair was never a cais that befell a man that woundit my hart sa sare [so sore], and cast me in sa terrible a tentatioun of doutting of the Providence of God, (seing sa guid a man left in the hands of sa vyll lowns!)’ [such vile loons], and ‘I was even drounde, a certean dayes, even almaist in a deadlie and sencles dispear [senseless despair]’, until God had pity and consoled him. As well as testifying to the overwhelming grief, it is striking that Melville presents this as one of the sorest temptations he had experienced. This must have been connected to the ominous recollection that Melville had previously told his friend that the fortunes of the Kirk rose when Smith was doing well, and conversely fell when Smith was having a bad time.73

71 JMAD, 86. 72 JMAD, 421; M.F. Graham, The Uses of Reform: ‘Godly Discipline’ and Popular

Behavior in Scotland and Beyond, 1560–1610 (Leiden, 1996), 296–8; see also for detail on the preceding political conflict in the town M.F. Graham, ‘“Doctrein” or “Filthie Speachis”? The St Andrews Ministers and the Politics of the 1590s’, in Langley, McMillan and Newton (eds), The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland. 73 JMAD, 422.

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Melville describes Smith as ‘my deir frind whill he leivit’ and that they had parted about twa houres befor his slauchter, with als grait sweitnes and joy of hart, arissin of a heavinlie conference, whilk [which] haid stowin twa houres from us or [ere] we was awar, as ever I haid in this warld; during the quhilk me thought that he and I bathe was caried from the erthe, and delyting our saulles in that lyff and glorie purchassed be the deathe of the Mediator and Saviour Jesus Chryst; till Mr George Mernse, bailye of St Androis for the tyme, a guid simple man, and his frind, cam and tuk him out of my maist hartlie embracing, sear against my will, for I was determined to keipe him with me that night, and go with him to St Androis on the morn.74

Any retrospective embellishments which may or may not have been added to this account are less important than Melville’s presentation and recollection of the conversation and fateful parting. While the church and town politics relating to the murder play a part in making it significant, there is no particular reason other than the nature of their personal relationship for Melville to go to such lengths to eulogise his friend and record the incident in such detail. This is reinforced by the way in which Melville’s introduction for the subsequent poetry about the event and Smith appeals directly to the reader’s own sense of friendship: ‘Gif [if] the reidar be holelie affectionat in trew and godlie frindschippe, he will not lothe of the poeticall passioun quhilk pleasit and easit me for the tyme’. Apologising for verse and even self-deprecatingly referring to it as ‘a dabbling countrey ryme’ was of course conventional, but the specific appeal to a shared understanding of friendship is a deliberate and significant choice by Melville.75 So is the selection of verse, as reinforced by the phrase ‘poeticall passioun’. The poem is intense, and heartfelt, as well as lengthy and headed with an unusually elaborate initial decorative ‘A’.76 It reinforces their friendship and his virtues, alongside wider discussion including the cowardly attackers (and manly Smith), and comfort for his widow when the refrains at the end of stanzas ‘Alas! Alas!’ switch to more

74 JMAD, 423. 75 JMAD, 423–4. 76 NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 317.

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comforting messages as the poem progresses.77 A final mention of Smith comes in relation to an eclipse which was seen to presage future deaths of ministers as well as echoing the loss of ‘guid James Smithe, the sune [sun] amangs the merchants’.78 This passage and the relationship with Smith is one of the most extensive and emotionally direct sequences in the Autobiography, and as is often the case in emotions history some of the most voluminous evidence can come in association with grief and bereavement. But Smith is just one example of the rich importance of friendship in Melville’s representation of his life and his recollections of both practical affairs, and the religious experiences and struggles at the centre of his narrative. Friendship could be equally or even more prone than family connections to prompt dramatic and embodied emotional experiences and reflections.

Flock If we were to think of Melville’s personal relationships and socioemotional sphere as a series of overlapping concentric circles, the next outward circle after family and friendship would arguably be his congregation. In the early stages, he records that it pleased God ‘to twitche [touch] my conscience with a solist cear [solicitious/anxious care] of my charge and flok’, even when there were many other distractions.79 Indeed this early section, Melville’s introduction to the Autobiography prior to the main history of his life, focuses at some length on his arrangements and efforts for organising and funding ministerial provision for his East Neuk parishes starting in the mid-1580s.80 It is not the most obvious introduction to an Autobiography, and presenting it as such was a deliberate and revealing decision. This is reiterated at the point of his commencement in the ministry at Anstruther in the main narrative several hundred pages later, when he mentions the business and directs the reader to ‘reid in beginning of this book, inregistrat ther at lynthe [length], and 77 JMAD, 427–33. The exclamation marks after ‘Alas’ and the spacing of the ‘Alas’ refrain serve to draw particular attention to them on the page: NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 319. 78 JMAD, 438–9. 79 JMAD, 7; DSL, ‘Solist’. 80 JMAD, 1–12. For ministerial arrangements and the expansion of the ministry in

these parishes, see also Graham, Uses of Reform, 222–6.

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of purpose’.81 His efforts to secure good ministerial provision across the parishes were clearly important to how he wanted his life to be read. This is also suggested by the framing of his reasons for rejecting calls to more lucrative parishes, partly via ‘my deir peiple’s hartes’, outlining an affective connection with his flock, and later on by ‘the love of my awin [own] flok and Presbyterie, and vicinitie of my uncle in St Androis’.82 Here the importance of family, ministerial brethren and community, and his love for his flock are integrated, but given that the parishes for which he was approached included St Andrews and Dundee, within or very close to his presbytery and close to his uncle, the parochial connection was clearly particularly significant. This is further developed in a dramatic incident selected for recollection. Soon after coming to Anstruther ‘ther fell out a heavie accident, quhilk [which] vexit my mynd mikle [much] at the first, bot drew me mikle neirar my God and teatched me what it was to haiff a cear of a flok’. An Anstruther man was slain by a piratical English attack, and the townspeople set out to sea to retaliate, which was ‘a grait vexation and greiff to my hart’. He recorded eating, drinking, and sleeping little (‘bot be constraint of nature’) for more than a week while they were away, and received them back safely with ‘grait joy’ and praise.83 Later on, in his verse on his illness in 1601, where the poem records that it would have been sweet to die, it is stated that his will to survive comes both from man’s natural impulse to live and his ‘murning flock, whereof I had the cure’, and that ‘frinds and flock for me did fast and pray’.84 He refers elsewhere to the ‘comfort’ he found in teaching in St Andrews and Berwick, and so there seems to have been a wider emotional commitment to the practice of teaching and preaching, but the connection to his specific parochial congregation went beyond this in constituting a bond with the people themselves.85 And the particular characteristics of his coastal congregation were evidently firmly still in mind many years later in exile, when he desired to ‘resume the oversight of my poor sea-faring people’.86 81 JMAD, 254. 82 JMAD, 6, 278. 83 JMAD, 257–8. 84 JMAD, 497. 85 JMAD, 197, 249. 86 M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 289.

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In both his recounting of his efforts to organise a sufficient ministry in the East Neuk, and of his emotional commitment to his congregation, there may have been elements of convention, or possibly even distortion. Even if so, again, the way in which emotion is deployed in this self-presentation is our most important lesson. There was of course also an important emotional element to the job of a minister itself: scholars such as Todd have made clear how significant emotional performance and communication was in preaching, for example.87 There are various ways of considering the role played by emotion in Melville’s pastoral work, and one of our earliest glimpses comes in his brief ministry to the exile community in Newcastle in 1584. His epistle and order of examination and discipline adopts some revealing language, especially considering that this was prior to his first conventional parochial ministry. It opens with exhortations ‘in maist tender love and affection’, and the analogy of the ‘fatherlie cear quhilk he has of us, in chasteising us as his awin deire childring’.88 The language emphasises the importance of the type of hot and lively zeal explored in Ryrie’s work on Protestant piety, with ‘fervent prayer’ that they ‘may be steired upe’ to grow ‘mair zealus and devot in spreit’.89 It also reiterates the importance of authenticity, for example in phrases like ‘rightlie humblit and unfeinedlie turned to him with all our harts’, and ‘mak his guid Spreit to dwell sa plentiouslie in your noble harts’.90 Melville was of course addressing a specific community of exiled elites and recognised that ongoing commitment to the cause needed to be high on the agenda.91 Although routine worship was typically unrecorded by its very nature, there are further elements which inform us on Melville’s interpretation of emotion in ministerial work. A decade after the Newcastle text, a detailed and vivid account of the covenanting that took place in the Synod of Fife reinforces the centrality of emotion.92 The aim was to ‘steir up the

87 Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 51–6; Yeoman, ‘Heart-Work’, 175–6. 88 JMAD, 173. 89 JMAD, 182; Ryrie, Being Protestant, esp. 68–73. 90 JMAD, 175, 181, 182. 91 JMAD, 175–7. 92 On Melville’s theological understanding of the covenant, see Yeoman, ‘Melville and the Covenant of Grace’; see also L. Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–51 (Oxford, 2016), 111–2; Dawson, ‘Covenanting’, 336–48.

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hartes of the breithring to an ernest consideratioun and feilling’ of transgressions, and true ‘sorrow, and greiff thairfor’.93 Moreover, as well as the recurrent language of stirring up and true ‘feilling’ of repentance, the organisational language of the covenanting process reveals an interesting emphasis on the heart as an almost freestanding entity. There are discussions of arrangements for preaching and reading phrased as ‘Nixt, for preparatioun of the hartes’, and for ‘better disposing of the hartes’, and then ‘Efter the quhilk, the hartes being sattelit [settled], the Moderator…’.94 Here, the fairly descriptive use of ‘hartes’ as the plural noun to refer to the participants is perhaps just as revealing of the fundamentally emotions driven nature of the enterprise as the more eye-catching language of the Lord stirring ‘sic a motion of hart’ and ‘trimbling and manie teares’.95 These were of course supposed to be particularly emotional occasions, culminating with those involved ‘full of spirituall joy in the saull as emptie of corporall fuid’, reminding us of the possible role of fasting and empty stomachs in heightening the intensity of experience.96 But this was also followed up by an emotional element in the catechetical text prepared for use on Melville’s Kilrenny parishioners, which included the catechisee performing key messages on fear of sin, with responses such as ‘O! that effrayes [frightens] me maist of all’.97 Indeed, it is in catechetical instruction and pastoral advice that we find some of our most direct evidence of emotion in use in Melville’s ministry. The title of his ‘catechisme’ as he prosaically refers to it in the Autobiography is itself significant: A Spirituall Propine of a Pastour to his People alliteratively connects him to his flock, and introduces the concept of a gift (‘propine’) which itself serves to highlight the relationship with the flock.98 The phrase ‘deir flock’ is repeated several times, including in the opening line. His Dedicatory Epistle, addressed to his kirk session elders and flock rather than an elite patron, attempts to make 93 JMAD, 353. 94 JMAD, 353–5. 95 JMAD, 355. 96 JMAD, 360. 97 JMAD, 365. 98 JMAD, 12; Melville, Spirituall Propine; for the significance of books as gifts, albeit

normally via dedications or other practices rather than in the titles and conceits of entire works, see F. Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2014), 43–50.

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a direct connection with them which echoes his ministry and presumably seeks to echo his sermons (‘as I cease not to commend unto you maist instantly [presently/urgently]’), and mentions the value of hearing advice in the form and voice with which a flock is most familiar. He therefore hopes it will flow ‘unto the heartes, houses and families’, again using ‘hearts’ as a plural noun to describe the parishioners.99 Melville emphasises the affective value of godly exercise: it ‘stirres up and sets the force of the soules affectiones towards God’ and ‘delytes the mind’; and thereby the flock may be ‘moved and stirred up to grow in knawledge and feeling of true godlines’.100 Non-verbal expression is emphasised: Melville notes ‘sighes and sobbes and zealous motions in the minde that cannot bee expressed be the mouth’.101 Ungodly emotion—‘our corrupt affections’—should be purged and redirected to godly ends.102 Both stirring up godly emotion and creating an emotive connection to his flock are central to his pastoral agenda in the book.103 The significance of the Propine’s publication is also suggested by the fact that in the manuscript copy of the Autobiography, Melville chose to insert a similarly worded retrospective note on its printing and the financial loss involved on two separate occasions, both at the end of the opening discussion of the ministerial issues in the East Neuk parishes discussed above, and at the relevant date in the Autobiography’s main flow.104 In some senses, this pastoral work returns us full circle to Melville’s vocation as a preacher and his personal spiritual journey. However, it is significant that this is presented not as a one-sided relationship, but as part of a close connection to the ‘hearts’ in his Fife flock, parishioners who are now faceless to us, but not to Melville.

99 Melville, Spirituall Propine, A2r-A4v, p. 33 (the opening few pages precede the main pagination). 100 Melville, Spirituall Propine, A2v, A3r. 101 Melville, Spirituall Propine, p. 6. 102 Melville, Spirituall Propine, p. 22; for the notion of channelling emotion more

generally see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 17. 103 See also Ritchie, ‘‘Dour-Mongers All’?’, 213–5. 104 NLS, Adv. Ms., pp. 10, 330 (cf. JMAD, pp. 12n, 443). The shade of ink differs

from the insertion to the main text, and the nib of the pen appears to have been sharper.

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Conclusion In this chapter, we have learned more about Melville as an individual and as a son, brother, husband, father, friend, and pastor, and crucially about how he wanted to depict these relationships. There are some specific patterns and areas of emphasis, and particular weight was placed on certain relationships (with his sister, his uncle, with certain friends), and on particular experiences which are specific to his own individual life story. Melville’s account of family relationships was closely intertwined with his spiritual journey and religious agenda, and rather than representing aspects of his life competing for emotional attention, this points to the importance of a more holistic and integrated thematic range in the study of early modern Scottish emotion. The emotional importance of friendship, in no way secondary to family in Melville’s case, is also significant and fondly remembered in Melville’s writings: community and fellowship would be fertile avenues for wider investigation. And Melville’s relationship with the more anonymous—to historians—members of his congregation was also literally heartfelt and heart-facing, and one in which a key part of his role involved the stirring and navigation of feeling. Melville himself might have justifiably viewed the tripartite division of these three groups as rather arbitrary, and indeed their interconnectedness is a key lesson from this material. As the study of Scottish emotions history in this period advances, it will need to pay attention not just to our subjects’ relationships with their God, but also with their social circles.

CHAPTER 4

Understandings of Emotion

Abstract This chapter explores the representation of emotion in Melville’s writings holistically. This firstly involves analysis of his vocabulary for emotional expression, ranging from negative to positive emotion and the close relationship between the two, as well as his language for specific emotional states. Secondly, the chapter analyses Melville’s location of emotion within the body, and via prompts provided by locations, items, and dreams. Collectively, this sets out a framework for understanding the emotional vocabularies, ranges, and tendencies of late sixteenth-century Scots. Keywords Emotions · Fear · Joy · Despair · Dreams · Tears · Body

Introduction The previous chapters have established the role of emotion in Melville’s writing on a range of life experiences and subjects. However, if we are to understand and conceptualise emotion in Melville’s context fully, and to derive discernible and applicable trends which can be used to inform further and wider study of early modern Scottish emotions, we need to explore some key dynamics and issues in Melville’s emotional world and understanding. This chapter explores firstly the key examples of negative © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0_4

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and positive emotion (although naturally the distinction and relationship between the two is complex), how Melville understood each of them, and the overall range of emotional expression. Secondly, it will examine the language utilised by Melville to represent emotion, and especially to locate emotion physically. As well as further material from the Autobiography, this chapter also draws more broadly on his other writings, and particularly his poetry, in order to develop a fuller picture of his discussion of emotion.

Melville’s Emotional Range Negative emotions were often central to Melville’s life-writing, and this was especially apparent in the earlier analysis of Melville’s suffering and sorrow in the church politics of the late sixteenth century. This often included extreme distress, anguish or anxiety, and sorrow, all of which were utilised in the service of his ecclesiological agenda. Also present was fear, but although this was often most dramatically linked to events in church politics, there were other contexts too in which fear was expressed. Sometimes fear related to events which were both inherently alarming and also linked to religious conflict, such as a threatened violent attack in St Andrews which made him ‘mikle fearit [much afraid]’, and a fire which although quenched just in time, had threatened to burn their quarters in the University ‘to the grait discourage of all guid men, and the joy of the wicked’.1 There was ‘grait fear and cear … in my hart’ as Melville grappled with his early doubts about his ability to pursue a theological career.2 In the early stages of his first English exile, he ‘fearit to haiff to do with’ the rebel nobles, and more prosaically on the journey there the sea crossing had understandably prompted ‘grait feir’ when passing near the land of an enemy who had previously intercepted boats.3 At various points, his correspondence from the late 1600s also refers to being gripped by fear, or torn between hope and fear at the situation or for the health of Andrew Melville in exile.4 On a more national scale, the fear prompted by the

1 JMAD, 85, 125. 2 JMAD, 84. 3 JMAD, 170, 172. 4 UECRC, MS Dc. 6.45, pp. 1, 46, 297.

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news of the Spanish invasion in 1588 was described as ‘terrible’.5 There was also of course the pious theme of the necessary fear of God observed in both Melville’s recollections of his spiritual journey and development, and often also in his spiritual poetry, in lines such as ‘I pant, I pine, I feare Gods fierie face’.6 God’s face is again the framing point of reference for the fear in another poem: ‘So long as I thus feare thine angrie face’.7 It is striking that although contexts in which fear is discussed are therefore variable, it is most central as an emotional experience in the situations which are most pertinent to Melville’s religious agenda, where it serves both to emphasise the seriousness of the situation, and to prepare the way for God’s providential saving from danger. Sadness and despair were often central in the personal spiritual journey and in Melville’s account of church politics. Passages involving despair occurred throughout the main period of the Autobiography, from the outburst when a youthful Melville could not understand his university lessons, being ‘cast in sic a greiff and dispear, because I understood nocht the regent’s langage in teatching, that I did nathing bot bursted and grat [wept]’ to the much later breakdown in his physical and mental health, again related to the political situation around 1600–1601.8 These emotions, of which further examples have already been discussed, often serve both to record Melville’s memory of how the events affected him, and to emphasise the seriousness and genuineness of his cause. A rather different sort of sorrow—for one’s sins—was central to contemporary spiritual writing, and Melville’s poetry again also expresses this richly.9 For example, ‘The Feeling of Sinne and force of Faith for salvation’ develops an emotional journey which starts with ‘dulefull dolour

5 JMAD, 261. 6 JMAD, 19, 29, 84; Melville, Spirituall Propine, ‘The Melancholious Christian’. There

is no pagination for these closing poems at the very end of the Spirituall Propine, coming immediately after p. 150. Although they (and the whole of the lengthy dream catechism in verse, the ‘Morning Vision’) are unfortunately missing from the version on Early English Books Online, ‘The melancholious Christian’ is accessible in full in S. Ross, ‘Elizabeth Melville and the Religious Sonnet Sequence in Scotland and England’, in S. Wiseman (ed.), Early Modern Women and the Poem (Manchester, 2014), 54–5. 7 NLS, Adv. MS. 19.2.7, f. 57r. 8 JMAD, 25, 489–94. 9 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 55–62.

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[sorrow/suffering] in distresse’ and many tears and sobs, but moves towards resolution in ‘euerlasting joy and glore’.10 Grief is naturally a negative experience which is particularly prone to producing evidence. And as we have seen, Melville’s writing was often particularly intense when recalling the deaths of friends and family members.11 There was also substantial use of emotional language in Melville’s published treatise on death. Ane Fruitfull and Comfortable Exhortatioun Anent Death (1597) states early on that ‘cheerefull contentment’ is the appropriate way to approach death, and as the title suggests, ‘comfort’ is a recurring theme.12 Daily life includes ‘infinite cogitations and commotions of the mind’, an interpretation of the familiar trope of worldly suffering in contrast with heavenly delight which seems to shine a particular spotlight on the anxieties Melville experienced at various points including in the 1590s, and there is a further particular contrast between worldly disorder and chaos, akin to a stormy voyage, and the ‘calme and chiereful herberie [harbour/shelter]’ of death.13 The final stanza of a psalm paraphrase makes the comparison between earthly life and death-afterlife by rhyming ‘miserie’ with ‘felicitie’. This binary phrasing is echoed, alongside others (hatred versus love; pain versus pleasure) a few pages later.14 Ane Fruitfull and Comfortable Exhortatioun makes frequent use of an emotional vocabulary and frame of reference which is familiar from Melville’s autobiographical and poetic writings. While the negative personal experience of grief is always and sometimes fulsomely acknowledged across Melville’s work, its productive value via the religious lessons provided and the contrasting comfort and hope offered in the afterlife are prominent too. Indeed, as this discussion has already hinted, the more positive emotions are closely related to the more negative ones. We have encountered discussion of joy already, and it was an emotion often very specifically presented as intertwined with sadness. His sister’s readings taught him the ‘peanes [pains] of hell and the joyes of heavin’ and ‘wald caus me bathe greit and be glad’, and James Lawson’s preaching left him ‘withe 10 Melville, Spirituall Propine, pp. 138–42. 11 For further examples see JMAD, 139, 219. 12 Melville, Fruitful Exhortatioun, pp. 7, 14, 33. 13 Melville, Fruitful Exhortatioun, pp. 22, 36. 14 Melville, Fruitful Exhortatioun, pp. 36, 40.

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teares bath of remors and joy’.15 In verse, grief and joy could be directly linked and coupled in passages such as ‘How are we greiv’d and gladit with thy bands/We greive to sie sic men comit’d as thee/We joy to heare how constantly thow stands’.16 At other times, joy followed from and was the positive outcome subsequent to sadness or despair, such as the ‘rysing from the ground with joy and grait contenment in hart’ which followed the youthful collapse where he vowed to pursue the ministry, or on recovery from illness and turmoil when ‘I find ten fauld of joy and pleasure sweit; mair then [more than] my seiknes and my pean before’.17 In Melville’s poetry, too, the spiritual joy following from the sadness or despair is repeated, sometimes very frequently, for emphasis, including when expanding on and amplifying biblical language. For example, in his extensive paraphrase of Psalm 51, following ‘sorrow’ for sin, reference to ‘The joy and comfort evangelicall’ is followed by the refrain ‘O! give me joy, that I may joy in thee’.18 This was often linked to godly exercises of various sorts: the covenanting and fasting which produced ‘trimbling and manie teares’ ended with participants replete with joy.19 Melville also took ‘plesure in the Psalmes’ and ‘grait joy and comfort’ in hearing Robert Bruce preach.20 The idea of taking pleasure or ‘delyte’ in godly activity is also prominent in the Spirituall Propine: it ‘delytes the mind’, and readers are encouraged to proceed ‘with delyte and pleasure, and be moved and stirred up to grow in knawledge and feeling of true godlines’.21 Indeed, the verse in the Spirituall Propine suggests a particular attempt to emphasise joy and delight, including through the sequence of sonnets at the end.22 There are numerous closing poems, including the ‘Feeling of

15 JMAD, 18, 52. 16 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 10v. 17 JMAD, 24, 499. 18 NLS, Adv. MS. 19.2.7, f. 57r. 19 JMAD, 360, see also 507. 20 JMAD, 22, 148; see also 197 for Melville deriving ‘grait joy and consolation’ from the work of teaching the godly in Berwick. On the emotional appeal and function of psalm-singing, see Hood, ‘Metrical Psalm-Singing and Emotion’. 21 Melville, Spirituall Propine, A2v-A3r. 22 For Melville’s authorship of these, see Ross, ‘Elizabeth Melville and the religious

sonnet sequence’, 53–4; cf. Mapstone, ‘James Melville’s Revisions’, 177.

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Sinne’ discussed above which foregrounds sorrow although culminating naturally in salvation and everlasting joy. Particularly striking are a series of sonnets addressing emotion (and the humours) more directly: ‘The sanguinean Christian’, ‘The dedication of the Heart’, ‘Holines for happines’, and ‘The melancholious Christian’.23 The choice of location and genre are significant: these come towards the very end of the Spirituall Propine, and provide shorter examples of the nature of ‘Devotion’ (who had also been the central character in the lengthy dream vision paraphrase of the Catechism, the ‘Morning Vision’).24 They are grouped together and deliberately explore different emotional experiences, and the sonnet sequence format links them, prompts comparisons between them, and enables them to echo or mirror each other. The ‘sanguinean Christian’ starts boldly and energetically: ‘I Shout, I cry, I loup [leap], I runne a pace/ My heart rebounds, this mirth hes mercie wrought’, and foregrounds joy and pleasure throughout, closing ‘The Sunne of justice, on my saul dois shine/ Whilk merrie makes, this mirthfull minde of mine’. While ‘mirth’ alliterates conveniently with both ‘mercie’ and other usefully instructive words, it appears to be a deliberately and enthusiastically joyful choice of wording. The ‘Melancholious Christian’ naturally contrasts with this joy, and although it ends with the necessary concluding note of comfort and reassurance, this is not its main purpose: instead it focuses in depth on the sorrow and tears (‘with sighes, and sobs alas’).25 Interestingly, there are no corresponding poems explicitly dedicated to the other two humours, with these two perhaps offering the most productive binary contrast of experience. However, ‘Holiness for happiness’ offers a female personification of the soul who despairs until receiving ‘perfite ioy [perfect joy]’, concluding with the concise statement ‘For to posses thy God, all happines’.26 There is a great effort here to ensure that happiness and joy are foregrounded in the emotional range of experiences presented to the reader. This emphasis, and the actual title of ‘Holiness for Happiness’, is echoed in some of Melville’s verse on the 23 Melville, Spirituall Propine, n.p. (closing poems, after p. 150). Like ‘The melancholious Christian’, ‘The sanguinean Christian’ is also provided in full in Ross, ‘Elizabeth Melville and the Religious Sonnet Sequence’, 55. 24 Melville, Spirituall Propine, pp. 53–133. 25 Melville, Spirituall Propine, n.p. (closing poems, after p. 150); Ross, ‘Elizabeth

Melville and the religious sonnet’, 54–5. 26 Melville, Spirituall Propine, n.p. (closing poems, after p. 150).

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death and memory of Robert Rollock, which must have been written soon after February 1599, not long after the publication of Spirituall Propine, and which prefaced a printed collection of Rollock’s sermons. In the second of three sonnets, happiness is central (in hearing him preach, and in hearing him speak at his death), and ‘happy’ or a variant is used five times. The closing lines repeat the verbal coupling of happiness with holiness in the Spiritual Propine poem: ‘Sa sall the preassing to his halines/ Mak us atteyne unto that happines’.27 As the Autobiography makes clear, these poems were certainly not written during times of comfort or ease for Melville, and the pastoral and spiritual work and writing may have been a welcome refuge, even if we may speculate that the tensions, hopes, and fears were finding expression in some of the verse. Positive experiences were often discussed through the language of sweetness, as we have seen through phrases such as ‘sum sweit and constant motiones of the feir and love of God within me’, and the idea of ‘sweetness’ was an important keyword in Protestant experience more broadly.28 This seemed to convey not just straightforward joy, but also the virtue or pious significance of an experience, as when God ‘corrected me sweitlie’ in taking his infant son from him.29 Its resonance in conveying strength of feeling is also suggested by its recurrent use in a variety of poetic contexts, for example in a verse lamenting the state of the Kirk to suggest affection for the poem’s addressee (‘sen [since] sweit lady now it is not sa’), and to convey nostalgia for the ‘sweit assemblies grait and small’ lost to royal ecclesiastical policy.30 The term was also used to amplify praise of God (‘his light and life so sweit’; ‘thy son our Savior sweet’; ‘sweetnes of thy love’), and seems to have been a particularly meaningful idea for Melville in seeking to convey strength of feeling or positive affections.31

27 R. Rollock, Certaine sermons upon severall places of the Epistles of Paul (Edinburgh, 1599), A8v; J. Reid-Baxter, ‘Liminary Verse: The Paratextual Poetry of Renaissance Scotland’, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 3 (2008), 70–94, at 82. 28 JMAD, 36–7, see also 16, 423; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 89–90. 29 JMAD, 269. 30 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, ff. 1r, 1v. 31 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, ff. 102v, 97r, 100r, see also 101v.

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The emotion of love, naturally enough and as hinted above, is also apparent in its various connotations in Melville’s writings. In the Autobiography, we have already encountered references to love in descriptions of Melville’s relationships with family (especially his sister) and friends.32 Romantic love was couched initially more circumspectly in the account of his ‘amorus’ youth and potential temptations, ahead of the recollection of his courtship of his first wife, when he ‘resolvitt with my God to settle my hart ther, tak hir for my love, and put all uther out of my hart’.33 As we saw, Melville also affirmed his love for his second wife as holy, chaste, and sober, as part of his defence of the age-gap to his sceptical uncle.34 But just as important is the subject of spiritual love—love for God, and equally God’s love for humanity. This found its most fluent expression, naturally enough, in Melville’s poetry, a genre better suited for the flowing expression of these sentiments than autobiographical writing. This is the direct focus of a poem meditating on God’s love, via expressions such as ‘O gracious God and mercifull/ Most loving good and kind/ Who loves thy faithfull saincts and mee/ Of love does beare in mynd’.35 Perhaps most striking, though, is the ‘Releife of the longing soule’, a lengthy and deeply researched presbyterian paraphrase of the Song of Songs.36 This provided opportunities for extensive reflection on love between Christ and the Kirk. Among numerous examples of romantic language in the voice of the Kirk are the lines ‘My love is red and wheat/As lillies mix’d with roses’ and ‘I am so moved with love/For love I am like to swoun’.37 Christ, the bridegroom, by turn refers to ‘thy [the church’s] sobs and sighs so sore’.38 Melville seems to have been concerned to include a healthy role for expressions of joy and happiness in his pious and pastoral writings. As has already been suggested, there is danger in suggesting too sharp a binary opposition between negative emotion and positive emotion, both in general, and with reference to the particular emotional complexity of 32 See for example JMAD, 18, 27, 29. 33 JMAD, 79–80. 34 See above, ‘Family’. 35 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 97v. 36 Reid-Baxter, ‘James Melville and the “Releife of the longing soule”’, 216–23, 226. 37 NLS, Adv. Ms., 19.2.7, ff. 83v, 68r. 38 NLS, Adv. Ms., 19.2.7, f. 86r.

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early modern Calvinist theological frameworks. But there was a contemporary recognition of, and in Melville’s case a poetic attempt to delineate in detail, the competing emotional states of sadness and joy. And the twin, equally necessary, emotions of fear and love for God find repeated and sometimes extensive expression as well. In surveying Melville’s emotional range, therefore, we might suggest that a unifying theme is the attempt to balance and synthesise between experientially contrasting, but ultimately theologically complementary, emotional states and impulses.

Melville’s Emotional Language How did Melville describe and locate emotional experiences and states? The overarching debate on the interpretation of words which are potentially analogous to the modern ‘emotion’ in the pre-modern period is obviously beyond the scope of this study, but it is important to address Melville’s particular usage of some key terms.39 As noted above, ‘motion’ is sometimes used, frequently in accordance with the widespread early modern sense of upheaval, and disturbance. This often refers to a negative or shocking experience: ‘great motion and greiff of mynd’, the ‘extraordinar motion in my hart’ which caused him to fall to the ground, or awaking ‘with grait feir and commotion’.40 It could also suggest positive experiences, especially when linked to early engagement with pious practice or his clerical vocation: Melville recalled in youth ‘that Sprit of sanctification begining to work sum motiones in my hart’ and his vocation is associated with ‘sweit and constant motiones’ and ‘motion of mynd and determination’.41 Sometimes, it suggests intensity and stirring but with a less simplistically negative or positive sense, such as a prayer during a time of great tribulation ‘quhilk [which] bred great motioune in the heartis of all the heareres’.42 So it seems that although there is a link to the sense of physical movement and upheaval, the word is also sometimes used with some analogy to our ‘emotion’ more generally, suggesting depth and strength of feeling.

39 See for example Dixon, ‘“Emotion”’; K. Essary, ‘Passions, Affections, or Emotions? On the Ambiguity of 16th-Century Terminology’, Emotion Review, 9 (2017), 367–74. 40 JMAD, 24, 50, 199. 41 JMAD, 8–9, 36–7, see also 443. 42 JMAD, 669.

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Similarly, ‘affection’ is used in different emotional settings, including friendship and family as well as godly affections. In connection to love, it could clearly represent everything from the filial to the romantic or sexual (‘a motherlie affection towardis me’; ‘affection enterit [began] verie extreamlie betwix that gentlewoman and me’).43 It could also be used for a wider variety of experiences, and again to suggest intensity, ranging from his uncle’s speaking ‘with birning affectiones to the honour of God and the King’s weill’ to Melville’s breakdown in his chamber where he had let his ‘affectiones brak out’.44 A contrast or at least a distinction with political opinions is suggested by the observation in a reported dialogue during Melville’s troubles in England in 1607 that ‘it is evident that quhair [where] oppiniounes differes thair affectiounes can not be sound’.45 ‘Affection’ and ‘motion’ seem to be then, with some qualification, used with reference to a sufficient range of differing emotional expressions and contexts to serve as Melville’s main terms of reference for what we would very broadly consider to be emotion. The same cannot be said of the third recurring term, ‘feeling’, which seems to be used with more specific emphasis on pious and devotional emotions: the young Melville spoke well in Church, ‘pronuncing with sum feiling’ and noted that the Reader read ‘with a religius and devot feilling’.46 The 1596 Fife covenant refers to stirring up ‘the hartes of the breithring to an ernest consideratioun and feilling’, and the title of the poem ‘The feeling of sinne and force of faith for salvation’ suggests a similar devotional emphasis to the term.47 However labelled, there is direct and wide-ranging evidence on the way in which emotion is understood as embodied in Melville’s writing. This is of course a familiar concept in the study of early modern emotions, and we have already encountered numerous examples of emotions located in

43 JMAD, 16, 79–80; see also 15, 25. 44 JMAD, 145, 313. 45 JMAD, 699. This quotation appears in UECRC, Dc4.10, p. 98 as ‘thair oppiniounis

differes thair affectiounes can not be sound’. However, this makes slightly less sense in context, and UECRC, MS MEL 3, p. 130 [pagination mine] reads ‘it is evident where there is diversity of opinions, that affections are not entire’, which suggests that the Dc.4.10 version is most likely a simple error of ‘thair’ for ‘quhair’. 46 JMAD, 22. 47 JMAD, 353; Melville, Spirituall Propine, 140–2.

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or expressed through the body.48 Emotions placed in the bowels could come through distress in wordly affairs or grief (‘I was nocht frie of the bowdnings of the bowelles of that naturall affection’, where a leaping movement in the bowels is implied).49 The entirety of the body is afflicted by grief in the verse lamentation for his friend James Smith: ‘this wounds my hart, my flaishe, my blud, and beans [bones]’.50 And a bodily location of the spiritual sorrow and despair at sin was also sometimes expressed in dramatic verse, through lines such as ‘But blood! O blood! O blood and bloodie sin/ How can my conscience be made cleen of thee?/ Thow vexes mee, and makes my sores to rin [run/flow]/ My rancklede heart, thow bit[e]s full bitterlie’.51 It should not be assumed that only negative emotions were represented in this way: Melville wrote to Patrick Simson in 1609 that various positive developments including his uncle’s health and the apparent failure of royal manoeuvres made him ‘wonderfully encouraged, and at intervals my breast heaves with the hope’ of success in the struggle against crown ecclesiastical policy.52 We have also identified the ubiquitous use of the heart as the site of emotion, to communicate authenticity and even as a freestanding object of emotional expression.53 And of course, we have frequently encountered tears as the most frequently discussed physical manifestation of emotion. Melville’s accounts of weeping reflected not just the familiar emotional narrative of sorrow for one’s sin and tears as a marker of genuine repentance, but also a range of textures of sadness, grief, distress at the situation of the Church, and intermingled sorrow and joy.54 This included others as well as Melville, through wider communal responses to affliction or godly exercises, and discussion of the tears of others could include the

48 K. Harvey, ‘The Body’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions, 165–6. 49 JMAD, 4, 270. 50 JMAD, 424; see also 145. 51 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 58r. 52 M’Crie, Life of Andrew Melville, 287. 53 For further examples, see NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 1r (‘my heart be much opprest’),

11r (‘O hart, far be it from the to invent’); Calderwood, History, IV, 306 (‘God knoweth our heart’). 54 JMAD, 19, 25, 33, 52, 86, 145; see also Ryrie, Being Protestant, 187–95; and for a prime example with extremely frequent reference to tears, see G.M. Paul (ed), Diary of Archibald Johnston of Wariston, 1632–39 (Edinburgh, 1911).

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same intertwining of joy and sorrow.55 They have often been mentioned so far in the context of some of the most significant emotional incidents in Melville’s religious and social life, but they were also referenced where other people mentioned departed friends ‘with teares’ or at partings (‘we tuk leive from Glasgw with infinit tears on bathe sydes’).56 The tears themselves are perhaps unsurprising in the original experience of these interactions, but the intent to record them so systematically especially in life-writing suggests their importance and value. Tears were especially prominent in Melville’s poetry, both in the context of personal piety (such as the ‘trickling teares, that dois abound, and sobbes sounding from the spleane’; or the ‘sighes, and sobs’ of the ‘Melancholious Christian’), and of lamentation for the oppression of what he saw as the ‘true’ Kirk.57 The latter was expressed most dramatically in The Black Bastel, where a whole stanza is dedicated to describing the tears of the female personification of the embittered church of Scotland: variously ‘a running well’; ‘some great floud’, ‘the earth may drink my tears as raine’.58 A subsequent poem continues ‘mine eyes powre out salt streames of teares/ thy thraldome to deplore/ mine heart doth bleed, my lungs doe leape/ and all my bowels roare’.59 And in the conclusion to ‘David’s Tragique Fall’, setting the scene for Melville’s paraphrase of Psalm 51, ‘his head became a fountaine full of teares… as the spirit his humbled heart indewes [endows]/He powrs to God the prayer that ensewes’.60 In the Autobiography, tears and sobs were sometimes accompanied by a range of other manifestations such as shuddering, breathlessness, rising from

55 JMAD, 222, 261, 626. 56 JMAD, 38, 84. Friends are also passed greetings ‘with tears’ in closing a letter to

Robert Durie in 1611: UECRC, MS Dc 6.45, p. 287. 57 Melville, Spirituall Propine, p. 138; Ross, ‘Elizabeth Melville and the Religious Sonnet’, 54. 58 Melville, The Black Bastel, A6r. The request to make the author’s head a well of tears, echoing Jeremiah 9:1, is also deployed in a manuscript sonnet: “[Sco]tland how should I beweall [bewail] thy case! / [O] That my head were maid a well of tears!”: NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 7v. 59 Melville, The Black Bastel, A7r. 60 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 56r. A quite literalistic representation of the spiritual signif-

icance of tears is also suggested in a satirical dialogue by Melville: ‘The teares of God’s afflicted are putt up in the bottels of his remembrance’: Calderwood, History, IV, 296.

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and falling to the ground, and verbalisations such as sighs or moans.61 Melville’s other writings also frequently use ‘sichis seir’ or similar phrasing whereby sore sobs and sighs convey the strong and authentic experience of pious sorrow or ecclesiastical oppression.62 Again, affective responses might be imputed to others, such as the admonitions in a legal case which ‘maide all the heireris astonischit, and their hairis to stand’. It could also be used rhetorically in a formal petition which cited the ‘sighes, sobbis and cryis of thair distressit sowles’, suggesting that it was anticipated to enhance, and certainly not to undermine, the legitimacy of the claim.63 This way of recording and describing emotions seems to have been conventional and unremarkable, which in itself is highly revealing of understandings and uses of emotion in late sixteenth-century Scotland. There is also no sense, either when referring to his own or others’ emotional outpourings, of the desirability of controlling, repressing, or limiting emotional outbursts. The nearest he comes to a sense of attempting to suppress excessive emotion is in the substantial breakdown discussed earlier, but this seems to be framed more as an attempt to survive and manage an emotional crisis rather than shame at excessive emotion or any sense of being ‘unmanned’.64 And there are also suggestions that the release provided by crying was positively valued: at the end of a dream vision poem set in Edinburgh labelled ‘1611’, Melville starts awake, still creeping with fear from the vision, and ‘sigh’t and gron’d howbeit [although] I could not weip’.65 The context here was not sorrow for personal sin (where tears connote authenticity of repentance), but a terrifying dream vision related to church politics, suggesting a more

61 See for example JMAD, 23, 24, 26, 86. 62 See for example NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, ff. 2r, 102v (‘‘[I] sigh, I sob, I dwine, I dye,

I birst’); Calderwood, History, IV, 325 (‘The Lord move our hearts to sob and mourne’). 63 JMAD, 625, 649. 64 See above, ‘Religious Politics and Emotion’; cf. B. Capp, ‘‘Jesus Wept’ But Did the

Englishman? Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, no. 224 (August 2014), 75–108. Although Capp notes an exception, and indeed ‘wholehearted approval’, for pious and penitential tears (95), Melville’s breakdown related not to his repentance or personal faith but the fortunes of his circle and ecclesiastical faction. 65 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, f. 7r.

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general value placed on the emotional relief provided by weeping.66 Typically, strong emotional responses such as weeping or sobbing (and severe emotional expression more generally) are presented as natural and even desirable responses to the significance of a whole range of circumstances. Moving beyond the body, particular places could have special emotional resonance. This was sometimes associated with the persistent sense of nostalgia evoked at various points in the Autobiography, such as the recollection of receiving affection in childhood near Montrose: ‘I cam never to the place bot God moved sum an with a motherlie affection towardis me’.67 Although it was someone else (‘sum an’) who treated him affectionately when he visited, recording the fact in this way suggests that Melville himself had come to associate the location with familial affection. More dramatic was the apparent association between the specific church building where his father had preached and the emotional turmoil of his early yearnings for the ministry: as the story of his collapsing is told he was ‘coming fornent [in front of] the kirk, and luiking to it, the Lord steirit upe ane extraordinar motion in my hart…’ Here, the proximity and the specific sighting of the building are represented as precipitating the emotional response.68 Something similar seems to have happened in the incident when Melville ‘beheld out of the pulpit in the scholles’, recalled his deceased fellow scholar and reported that ‘my breist could nocht contein my breathe nor my eis teares’.69 Although Melville’s complex early vocational experience and the memory of the scholar were clearly important, Melville specifically links the emotional incident to the location where they had shared experiences. More positively, returning north having collected his eldest son from Berwick-upon-Tweed, ‘we retourned the neirest way be the Ferrie of Northe Berwik, passing the quhilk [which] I was in the graittest perplexitie of ane [any] that ever I was in my tyme befor, and haid the maist suddan and confortable releiff of my guid and gratius God and Father’.70 Place could therefore 66 Regret for an inability to weep is found in the later diary of Archibald Johnston of Wariston, where ‘being dejected befor supper for want of tears, after supper I got them in great aboundance’: Paul (ed), Diary of Archibald Johnston, 129. For tears and authentic repentance more generally see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 189. 67 JMAD, 16. 68 JMAD, 24. 69 JMAD, 86. 70 JMAD, 251–2.

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prompt release and even catharsis, among a range of different emotional associations and responses. Physical objects could also be rich repositories of emotional meaning.71 Specific items are rarely mentioned directly in the Autobiography, but an interesting passage in Melville’s upsetting time in St Andrews, after the collapse of the Ruthven regime and Andrew Melville’s flight to England, suggests the potential emotional resonance of books. Gathering up his uncle’s books, which were also in danger, ‘skarse was ther ane quhilk [scarce was there one which] I haid knawin in his comoun use that ranckled nocht my wounds againe’. The close association between his uncle and his most-used books is presented as further upsetting a pain which was already being discussed in the most severe physical terms as a wound, ‘skarslie stemit’ [scarcely staunched].72 Such textual recollections are perhaps inevitably rare in this form of writing, but given the distance of nearly two decades from the memory, it was evidently a powerful one. There could be further value in exploring the emotional value attached to material objects in Reformation Scotland, and perhaps especially books and manuscripts in ministerial and academic circles.73 Melville also recorded emotional responses to natural phenomena and dream visions. Although Melville knew it was due, and knew about the ‘naturall caus thairof’, when the eclipse of 1597 came ‘to the amazfull, uglie, alriche [uncanny; eldritch] darknes, I was cast on my knies, and my hart almaist fealled’. The verse and discussion which follows draws associations with the dark time for ecclesiastical politics and deaths of ministers and friends, including ‘guid James Smithe, the sune amangs the merchants’.74 The eclipse and its portents is also revisited in one of the few more personal sections of the True Narratioune: even though Melville knew the causes and the expected date of it, he ‘was struckin with such feir and astonischment, that I had no refuge but to prostrat

71 S. Downes, S. Holloway and S. Randles (eds), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History (Oxford, 2018). 72 JMAD, 145. 73 Although focused more on the spiritual weight or meaning ascribed to physical

books, see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 292–7; for a particularly intriguing study of physical engagement with medieval manuscripts, see also Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, 1–2 (2010), 1–26. 74 JMAD, 438–9.

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on my kneis, and commend my selff to God, and to cry for mercie’.75 A few years later, there was a large coastal flood or tsunami in Fife, and ‘about that sam tym, lying in Kinkell, I dreamed my wyff was dead’, and subsequently ‘sche was strucken with sic infirmitie, that sche could nocht be a wyff to mie’.76 The portentous flood and dream were added retrospectively in the margin, apparently prompted by recalling the execution of the Gowrie conspirators, suggesting further associations with politics, as does the perception on another occasion that ‘God warnit me of that trouble [at St Andrews University] be a dream of fyre and water, quhilk [which] moved me mikle’.77 Starting awake from a dream, afraid or anxious, occurs not just in the dream-poem headed ‘1611’ mentioned above, but also in another short poem (‘When dreadfull dreames does waken me’), and in the Autobiography’s account of the portentous dream of his father’s death from which he awoke ‘with grait feir and commotion’.78 Possibly Melville was personally prone to troubled dreams and sleep, or was no more than averagely so but found discussing them both literally and metaphorically a convenient way to express the significance or depth of emotional experience. Dreams and natural portents, in any case, can be identified as another prompt for emotional responses both in Melville’s experiences and in his representation of emotional events.

Conclusion This chapter has shown significant variety and nuance in the emotional experiences recorded by Melville. This includes variety in type of emotion and indeed a complex intermingling of positive and negative emotions, and a variety of stimuli which could prompt fear, sadness, despair, joy, and grief. These related not only to Calvinist introspection and affective piety, but also public affairs (above all ecclesiastical politics, naturally enough for Melville), and family and personal relationships. ‘Feeling’ was used mainly to refer to the tropes of Calvinist affective piety, while ‘motion’ and ‘affection’ could refer to a much more comprehensive range of emotional states

75 JMAD, 525. 76 JMAD, 485–6; NLS, Adv. Ms. 34.4.15, p. 362. 77 JMAD, 314. A letter from 1612 suggests that Melville retained an interest in

portentous events such as monstrous births: EUCRC, MS Dc 6.45, pp. 300–1. 78 NLS, Adv. Ms. 19.2.7, ff. 1r, 7r; JMAD, 50.

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or experiences. As well as the Autobiography, these emotional expressions were reflected in and sometimes amplified in his other writings, and especially his spiritual poetry. They were sometimes particularly associated with specific places or even dreams and natural phenomena. Typically of course they were located in the body, and often—whether positive, negative, or both—expressed physically in tears. Through probing Melville’s use of language in this way, we can begin to trace the contours of emotional expression and understanding in the wider society of which he was a part.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract This chapter concludes the study via a synthesis of the chapters, reflections on the overall lessons learned from the study of emotion in Melville’s writing, and an extended discussion of implications for the next steps in early modern Scottish emotions historiography. Keywords Emotions · Emotions historiography · Methodology

In the account of James Melville’s deathbed, at a point when he was undergoing some of the worst pain and unable to speak, it was recorded that ‘his sone rememberit him of manie confortabill speiches of Scripture, quhilk he heard with great joy, and greatt cheirfullness. In takin [token] quhairof, he geve ever ane demonstration, and signed with his handis, testefieing his inward motione’.1 Whether or not this was a literal description of the scene, it is entirely consistent with the understanding and experience of emotion which Melville projected in his own writings. It combines family and the comfort of scripture, a suffering which was intertwined with joy, and a concern to validate and authenticate the 1 JMAD, lxii. In another account, most of the same components are present with different wording: he ‘gave ever a demonstration and signe with his hand, in token of his joy and feeling, when anie comfortable sentence of Scripture was uttered to him’: Calderwood, History, vii, 188.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0_5

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depth and bodily consistency of this emotional dynamic. The fact that a posthumous account by a contemporary could provide such an effective and pithy snapshot of the evidence to have emerged from a study based entirely on texts authored by Melville himself, serves to reinforce the suggestion that more may be revealed in these texts than just the feelings of one individual. Of course, we have encountered a wider range of experiences and expressions of emotion than these. This study has uncovered the ways in which emotion was central to James Melville’s understanding and representation of his life and experiences. As we have seen, he sought to represent emotional struggle, involving both despair and joy in a complex cycle, as central to his early life and experience. This was particularly linked to sermons and preaching, both as early experiences and prefiguring his own sometimes difficult journey towards his clerical vocation. He recalled particularly sharp moments of crisis and anxiety, while also acknowledging God’s role in relieving these and remembering them retrospectively from a place of greater confidence. God’s particular intervention and role in Melville’s spiritual development and vocation is identified with an authenticity confirmed by embodied responses. Equally, Melville represents the affairs of the Kirk as having a deep emotional impact early in his life. This sometimes involved incidents of extreme despair and breakdown, especially when presbyterian hope turned to dismay in the mid-1580s, but also recurred persistently through the 1580s and 1590s as the fortunes of his tendency in the Kirk waxed and waned. All aspects of ecclesiastical policy as well as the highest profile events and setbacks could prompt emotional responses and discussion, and this could include fond and nostalgic memories of times of joy and comfort for Melville and his brethren. Indeed, these events, although primarily and inevitably depicted via the emotional impact on Melville himself, are sometimes also presented as prompting wider public emotional responses. There are persistent associations between what Melville saw as the correct cause, and emotional authenticity and the heart. Melville’s life-writing also offers rich emotional expression when recording family relationships, first instanced through his sister’s role in the absence of his mother, and the more problematic and complex relationship with his stern father. His uncle Andrew then became a key figure for the rest of his life. Routine family life is rarely visible in the Autobiography, but Melville’s first marriage is fondly recalled and integrated with the religious narrative both via the familiar theme of release from

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sexual temptation (echoed in the pious defence of his second marriage in the years after his life-writing), and via its close association with church reform and Melville’s brethren in the presbyterian grouping. The joys of parenthood are often recalled in the shadow of the parental bereavement which prompted some of the most expressive emotional language on the family. The idea and experience of friendship was no less emotionally resonant than family for Melville. These two circles often overlapped, and Melville’s experience of friendship was also intimately connected with his brethren in the Kirk. His writing sought to record the specifics of individual friendships, and to recall, again with nostalgia, happy gatherings and time spent with individual friends. Again though, bereavement often occupied more space and authorial effort when Melville reflected on ‘godlie frindschippe’. The close association between interpersonal relationships and religious experiences was also evident in Melville’s concern to foreground an emotional connection to his parishioners in various ways. This emphasised not just the important role of the minister in stirring affections but also the affective bond with the dear ‘hartes’ of his congregation. Melville’s writings, both within and beyond the Autobiography, reveal a rich and complex emotional range. Negative emotions such as fear in various nuanced forms, sadness, and despair at personal and political setbacks, and grief are often present. They are often intertwined with, rather than separate from, the happiness and joy also found both in personal and spiritual comforts. The love of God and the joy found in godly associations and community are typically in balance, and even in direct dialogue with the more familiar negative emotional experiences. Melville’s writings also enable us to identify vocabularies and locations of emotion, with ‘motion’, and ‘affection’ serving as the broadest identifying labels for approximately what we might refer to as ‘emotion’. This was frequently situated in the body, and within specific parts of the body, in various ways across the various genres of writing, and emotion was also expressed frequently in the flowing of tears, which again intertwined both positive and negative emotion, and blurred the boundaries between the two. Additional prompts and sources of emotional expression also came from places, and from dreams, and these typically relate to the themes of spiritual progress, wider public ecclesiastical affairs, and the personal relationships at various levels which intersected with godly experiences and dynamics. Throughout his writings, Melville presents a connection

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between emotional intensity and depth of feeling, and authenticity and godliness. Collectively, this suggests that Scottish Reformation scholarship needs to engage more overtly with emotion, partly because as Melville shows us, faith in all its aspects was something which should be deeply felt. It was an essentially emotional enterprise. This adds urgency and weight to the need to revise views of Protestant life as ‘unemotional’ or experientially narrow, especially by focusing on a new national and confessional setting which is generally associated with the stricter and more repressive end of the spectrum of Reformed Protestantism.2 Equally though, this study has shown that emotion in Scotland must be understood holistically and that important material can be found across a wider range of experiences and themes than individual spirituality. These strands of experience were closely integrated and should not be viewed in isolation from each other. Indeed, emotion can serve as a thread which connects what could appear to be distinct components of religious life, from the interior to the political and social. Melville’s example should encourage us to attend to the role of emotion even in cases where the source material is less immediately promising, and suggests a new way of viewing what the religious changes and tensions of the period meant for people. More broadly, this study has also demonstrated that research on Reformation-era Scotland can contribute to the developing historiography of emotions, both by adding a new political and cultural context in which the workings and expression of emotion can be understood and then ultimately compared, and by exemplifying the rich value of the field even when applied to a setting without a reputation for emotional depth, complexity, or evidence. In combination with Melville’s chronological position, his formative experiences, education, and professional development occurring from the 1560s to the 1580s, this enables us to consider specific ways in which the study of emotion in early modern Scotland can now be advanced still further, as the rest of this conclusion will outline. One of the obvious things making Melville distinctive is his authorship of a major extant autobiography. Although the much greater volume of life-writing from subsequent centuries could usefully be examined with the insights of emotions history and a similarly expanded frame of reference, there are no directly equivalent opportunities for Melville’s

2 Rosenwein, ‘Periodization?’, 16, 26.

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immediate contemporaries or predecessors.3 But although Melville’s lifewriting may foreground personal emotional experience to a greater extent than the early modern European norm, it is not necessarily the case that his emphasis on emotion is in direct correlation with his decision to undertake this life-writing exercise.4 Melville might seem at first glance to present the opposite verdict to Dawson’s study of John Knox, which suggested that ‘the more he felt, the less he wrote’.5 But Melville was not writing in the heat of any of the dramatic moments we have encountered: he was instead choosing to emphasise and represent particular emotional responses and experiences to particular events in his life from a position of hindsight. Moreover, there were suggestions that some emotional experiences—including the pleasures of private family life and the worst depths of despair and turmoil—could be summarised or passed over less explicitly, interestingly in two cases several hundred pages and several years in the narrative apart, with reference to his being one of God’s ‘secret annes [ones]’.6 Perhaps Melville sometimes preferred to defer to the fact that his God knew what he had experienced. In any case, and in combination with the more prosaic point that many thousands of words in the Autobiography are taken up with an ecclesiastical historical narrative which even in the main section was not always so directly personal in style, it seems safe to conclude that Melville did not leave us his Autobiography as a direct result of his dramatic emotional life. It is at least plausible, then, that Melville was an outlier in evidential rather than emotional terms. This study points to some areas where historians can expand directly on Melville’s understandings and experiences. We have seen how Melville presented a connection between emotional intensity and depth of feeling, and authenticity and godliness. It is worth emphasising that he ascribed this to others and to the wider public at times as well, suggesting that it was plausibly felt to be a resonant association. This suggests further

3 Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self . Another potential approach is suggested by Campbell, Life and Works of Robert Baillie, 198–200, which shows that the curation and organisation of correspondence and other personal archival material could itself constitute a meaningful form of life-writing; for a still broader approach including accounts and parish registers, see Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England. 4 Pollman, Memory, 24–7, commenting on a primarily continental source base that they ‘often have little to say about their feelings’. 5 Dawson, Knox, 205. 6 See above, ‘Family’; ‘Religious Politics and Emotion’; JMAD, 136–7, 444.

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avenues for research paying attention to the nuances of language in religious and political discourse and rhetoric in Reformation Scotland, utilising the much larger body of documents which are less overtly personal than Melville’s writing.7 This need not be limited to the contents of textual arguments: a recent collection has richly highlighted the importance of gesture and performance in the National Covenant, and these aspects could also be considered for the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation.8 Furthermore, Melville’s discussion of personal relationships inherently reflects a broader experience beyond the individual, and suggests a possible focus for investigation even for the earlier part of the Reformation period via correspondence between family and friends, and by the seventeenth century including the ‘flock’ via the expanding body of evidence from sermons and treatises.9 For some of this study’s findings, it will be particularly important to consider how far Melville’s experience and representation were shared. Building on recent research which questions the assumption that nostalgia is an inherently modern feeling which depends on a sense of change between distinct eras, Melville’s frequently nostalgic recollection of earlier phases in personal and ecclesiastical development suggests a line of enquiry which can be applied to a range of less immediately subjective and personal texts such as histories and chronicles.10 Similarly Melville’s 7 For suggestive examples in the covenanting context, albeit not from the specific angle of emotions studies, see Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution, 62–70, 217–26. 8 N. Hood, ‘Corporate Conversion Ceremonies: The Presentation and Reception of

The National Covenant’ and L. Yeoman, ‘A Godly Possession? Margaret Mitchelson and the Performance of Covenanted Identity’, in C. Langley (ed.), The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689 (Woodbridge, 2020); see also Langley, ‘Deportment’. 9 For an example of a published collection of correspondence, see J. Dawson (ed.), Clan Campbell Letters, 1559–83 (Edinburgh, 1997); there are of course also significant collections of correspondence and other family and personal papers in archives. For the distinct methodologies that would be needed in such study, see for example C. James and J. O’Leary, ‘Letter-Writing and Emotions’, in Broomhall and Lynch (eds), Routledge History of Emotions. For sermons, see M. Brock, ‘Exhortations and Expectations: Preaching about the Ideal Minister in Post-Reformation Scotland’, in Langley, McMillan and Newton (eds), The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland. Published treatises by ministers start to appear and survive in increasing volume from around the turn of the seventeenth century: Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 3; McCallum, Reforming the Scottish Parish, 95–6. Nathan Hood’s forthcoming work also promises to contribute very significantly on the role of emotion in public religious practice. 10 Pollman, Memory, 9, 192. For a couple of suggestive comments on other possible examples of nostalgia in sixteenth-century Scottish religious experiences, see Dawson,

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depictions of dreams, and the prompt to dramatic emotional experience which was provided by specific places and locations, are potential thematic focal points that could be explored in a wider range of less immediately emotional source material, without assuming that others were necessarily moved in the same ways.11 Conversely, useful questions are also raised by emotions which were not emphasised in Melville’s writings. While it cannot be assumed that these were not felt or considered important by Melville, their relative absence provides another useful jumping off point for further study. For example, anger was occasionally emphasised in connection to the actions of enemies, but not as a significant emotion felt by Melville. This was not because he did not feel it—clearly he felt something closely corresponding to what we consider to be anger frequently in relation to church politics—but it was of course an emotion widely considered to be problematic in principle (albeit complex in practice), and Melville presents it as contradictory with truthfulness at one point in his correspondence.12 Similarly, emotions associated with sinful inclinations inevitably appear more briefly via condemnation in other works (such as ‘the corrupt and filthy affectiounes’ associated with profane music in Melville’s pastoral writing) or in the Autobiography via the recollection of their fortunate avoidance (such as Melville’s early amorous temptations).13 Features which are minor elements in the weight of explicit evidence which Melville has left us should certainly not be assumed to be unimportant in future studies of the wider range of contemporary experience and evidence. What are the broader possibilities for expanding beyond the example provided by James Melville? Firstly, we should consider Melville’s personal characteristics, not merely to qualify this study’s findings and reiterate the mundane point that he cannot be treated as a ‘representative’, but also to suggest ways in which we can productively build on the particular evidence he provides. Of course, he was not just a literate author of

Knox, 227; J. Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh, 1981), 163. Coincidentally, a namesake of Melville was the author of an obvious example of a contemporary history which, although lacking the focus on the personal life story, could potentially be utilised in wider study of emotion in the representation of political events: G. Donaldson (ed.), The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill (London, 1969). 11 See above, ‘Melville’s Emotional Language’. 12 UECRC, MS Dc 6.45, p. 129; Pollock, ‘Anger’, 569–73. 13 Melville, Spirituall Propine, A2r; above, ‘Family’; JMAD, 79.

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extended writing, but also a minister. Future studies would benefit from including lay authors, while also remembering that ministers were the ‘nexus of Reformed communities’ and therefore had particularly important roles in shaping life and attitudes.14 This also makes more pressing the question of the extent to which the ministerial community represented an emotional community or communities, including potential fault lines along ideological and geographical grounds, as well as the relationship with lay communities. As in much emotions history, Melville as an entrypoint represents a figure who is part of an ‘elite’ by virtue of his clerical and educational status, although equally not from a landed or excessively wealthy background. In fact, given this study’s emphasis on the range of emotional experience possible in contemporary Scotland including arenas of public discourse and politics, family and social connections, it might be that there is a significant opportunity to consider lay elites, as well as the more challenging task of including more ordinary voices.15 Perhaps most obviously, Melville’s evidence is from a male perspective, and there also remains much to do to develop a fully gendered understanding of emotion in his period. As well as working to study female experiences and expression, and assessing what gendered patterns apply within or across Scottish emotional communities, it will be possible to question the extent to which Melville represented a standard masculine approach to emotion for his milieu. In his self-representation, at least, there is less emphasis than we might expect on the importance of self-control and restraint as a manly virtue, though this may in part be a consequence of his autobiographical and experiential as opposed to directly prescriptive writing.16 Paying attention to other intersections, as well as genre and purpose of text will be useful here, such as the distinction between clergymen and laymen. 14 Nugent and Stauffer, ‘Scotland’s “Holy Households”’, 70. 15 Approaches here will need to be informed by methods such as those discussed below

for interrogating less expressive source material, and potentially correspondence. For a useful recent example of the potential to tease out important detail on the lives even of nobles with very significant and unfortunate gaps in source survival, see M. Kerr-Peterson, A Protestant Lord in James VI’s Scotland: George Keith, Fifth Earl Marischal (1554–1623) (Woodbridge, 2019). 16 See for example the greater sense of restraint and management of emotion tied to masculinity in some sixteenth-century poetry in S. Dunnigan, ‘Be Wise in Thy Governing’: Managing Emotion and Controlling Masculinity in Early Modern Scottish Poetry’, in Abrams and Ewan (eds), Nine Centuries of Man.

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Although based on just one individual, this study suggests ways in which the idea of emotional communities (groups sharing ‘particular values, modes of feeling, and ways to express those feelings’) may be one of the most fruitful ways to expand our knowledge of emotion in Reformation Scotland.17 The sophisticated range and expression of emotion raises questions about possible variations and commonalities in emotional language in the overlapping communities which Melville participated in (and was in part writing for), and indeed those in which he did not. Melville’s style is at least consistent with the possibility that we should think in terms of the sort of emotional ‘mosaicism’ suggested by Rosenwein.18 Of course, the models and theories of emotion are not mutually exclusive, and various approaches can be utilised: Nathan Hood’s study of a mid-seventeenth-century preacher drawing on the Stearns’ model of emotionology to identify significantly more importance for moderation and restraint provides an important counterpoint.19 This is such a new field that all tools should be considered.20 But the framework of emotional communities offers distinct advantages for two particular areas which this study has emphasised: including emotional life beyond the individual spiritual process and affective piety, and including emotions in the earlier period well before the covenanting era and especially back into the sixteenth century where the availability of sources recedes. One of the more obvious ways in which we could explore emotional communities building on the single individual utilised here is via the 17 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 3. 18 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 320. 19 More examples at this level of personal detail would be needed to start to draw firm

conclusions, but it is at least possible that both chronology and genre of text, especially the distinction between sermons and autobiographical writing, as well as personal style, could help to explain the apparently lesser role for emotional restraint and moderation suggested by this study of James Melville. The broader point, however, is to look for, as Hood puts it, a ‘variety of experiential styles, outlooks, restraints, variants, and counter-styles’: Hood, ‘“Wings of the Soul”’, 209, 223–4. 20 The physicality of manuscript evidence, although not central in the present study since the main manuscript of the Autobiography is a tidy copy (see above, ‘Sources and Methodology’) may have significant potential. As we have seen, even in this case, there were some significant patterns in the details about family and especially friendship which Melville chose to insert subsequently to the original writing. Further research may identify documents with more physical evidence of emotion, but Melville’s writings themselves demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the layout and presentation even of fairly straightforward manuscripts.

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social and cultural communities closest to Melville in person and inclination. This would include the circle of presbyterians in Fife whose literary work is being uncovered by Jamie Reid-Baxter, as well as the ministry more broadly.21 It is highly likely that such work would identify shared emotional registers and expression, but it is also vital that such work proceeds without presuming the borders and contours of emotional communities, and looks open-mindedly too at the work of writers from all religious traditions where both shared and varying emotional registers may be found. This could apply within studies of works in similar genres, but also reiterates the possibilities for utilising a much wider and much less obviously ‘emotional’ source material, as in the earlier medieval contexts where the framework of emotional communities was first developed.22 This would involve linguistic analysis of emotional vocabularies from a wide range of genres (and a more diverse range of authors) which need not be addressing emotion nor individual experiences directly, and considering deeper issues such as what they consider valuable, harmful, and what effect they seek to have on their audience.23 Crucially, this would provide us with ways in which to explore emotions earlier in the sixteenth century. This was a period for which we do not have source material directly analogous to Melville’s Autobiography, but one which must have shaped him in 21 Reid-Baxter, ‘Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross’; Reid-Baxter, ‘Posthumous Preaching’; J. Reid-Baxter, ‘A Spiritual Community on the Margins: James Melville and William Murray singing of Holy Dying in the East Neuk of Fife’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 12 (2021), n.p. The sonnets by various ministers collected within Melville, Spirituall Propine, themselves share similar themes and styles; see also Reid-Baxter, ‘Liminary Verse’, 84–5. Further obvious possibilities include the poetry of Elizabeth Melville and the work of their circles, and a wider range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literary work which is too extensive to be listed here but much of which is referenced in the various articles by Reid-Baxter in the Bibliography; for Elizabeth Melville see also Ross, Women, Poetry and Politics, ch. 1; Ross, ‘Peripatetic Poems’. 22 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 24–9. 23 For overviews of technique and principles, see Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling,

6–10, 125–8, 141; A. Lynch, ‘Emotional Community’, in Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions. It is not possible here even to summarise the potential genres of source for sixteenth-century Scotland which could be utilised, since the purpose of the method is to draw in seemingly ‘dry’ or formulaic material, including charters and monumental inscriptions. As well as these and the source types highlighted elsewhere in this conclusion such as correspondence, it is likely that contrasting genres such as wills and the polemical and theological works of the mid-sixteenth century Reformation period could represent examples of useful avenues of evidence to explore using the framework of emotional communities.

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fundamental ways, best approached through the ‘fluid paradigm’ of overlapping and related communities and both continuity and change—rather than teleology—identified by Rosenwein.24 This study has revealed one part of the mosaic of emotion in early modern Scotland. James Melville might have been unusually personal and discursive in his writing, but the range and centrality of emotion and emotional expression within it strongly suggests that that there will be rich emotional material to be excavated in the world of his contemporaries and predecessors, even if a more diverse and sophisticated toolkit will sometimes be needed when expanding the dig into less immediately abundant trenches. With a sensitivity to the range, depth, and complexity of emotional experience and expression which is revealed by Melville’s writing, and with a wider set of methods—and no doubt differing approaches and arguments from those adopted here—there is an exciting range of emotional histories of Reformation Scotland waiting to be written.

24 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 12–3.

Bibliography

Unpublished Primary Sources National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Advocates Manuscripts 19.2.7: ‘Poems of James Melville, Minister of Kilrenny’. Advocates Manuscripts 34.4.15: ‘Mr James Melville’s Diary’. University of Edinburgh, Centre for Research Collections Laing III: 335: ‘Acts of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland’. MS Dc 4.10: Manuscript Copy of James Melville’s ‘A true narratioune of the declyneing aige of the Kirk of Scotland’, transcribed by Ninian Dunlop, 1625. MS Dc. 6.45: ‘Melvini Epistolae’. MS MEL 3: Manuscript copy of ‘A true narratioune of the declyneing aige of the Kirk of Scotland… by James Melville (1556–1614)’, 1594–1610.

Printed Primary Sources Atkinson, D. (ed.), The Works of James Melville (New York, 2019). Calderwood, D., The History of the Kirk of Scotland (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1842–9). Dawson, J. (ed.), Clan Campbell Letters, 1559–83 (Edinburgh, 1997). Donaldson, G. (ed.), The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill (London, 1969). Melville, J., Ane Fruitful and Comfortable Exhortatioun anent Death (Edinburgh, 1597). Melville, J., A Spirituall Propine of a Pastour to his People (Edinburgh, 1598). Melville, J., The Black Bastel (Edinburgh, 1634). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0

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Melville, J., The Diary of Mr James Melvill, 1556–1601 (Edinburgh, 1829). Paul, G. M. (ed.), Diary of Archibald Johnston of Wariston, 1632–39 (Edinburgh, 1911). Pitcairn, R. (ed.), The Autobiography and Diary of Mr James Melvill, MDLVIMDCX (Edinburgh, 1842). Plutarch’s Lives: The Translation called Dryden’s, rev. A.H. Clough (5 vols, Boston, MA, 1906) Rollock, R., Certaine sermons upon severall places of the Epistles of Paul (Edinburgh, 1599). Smith, M. (ed.), ‘The Presbytery of St Andrews 1586–1605: A Study and Annotated Edition of the Register of the Minutes of the Presbytery of St Andrews’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1985). Spottiswoode, J., History of the Church of Scotland (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1847–51).

Reference Works Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk, last accessed 28 July 2022). Scott, H., Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1915–50).

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Index

A Anstruther, Fife, 20, 60, 61, 64 Armada, Spanish, 69

B Baillie, Robert, 9 Berwick-upon-Tweed, 19, 56, 61, 71, 80 Bible, 44, 71, 78, 85 Black, David, 20 Bruce, Robert, 7, 16, 57, 71 Buchanan, Thomas, 57

C Calderwood, David, 14, 16, 22 Clerk, Deborah, second wife of James Melville, 22, 49, 50 covenanting, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 62, 63, 71, 76, 90, 93

D death, 22, 46, 52, 53, 58–60, 70, 87

dreams, 46, 49, 82, 83, 87, 91 Dundee, 61 Durie, Elizabeth, first wife of James Melville, 18, 20, 47–49, 53, 55, 82 Durie, John, 18, 19, 47, 51, 54, 56 Durie, Robert, 56, 57, 78

E Edinburgh, vi, 18, 79 education, 10 episcopalianism, 19, 21, 77

F fasting, 61, 63, 71

G General Assemblies, 18, 21, 47, 49, 57 Glasgow University, 17, 49, 78

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. McCallum, Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15737-0

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INDEX

I illness, 21, 47, 49, 52, 55, 61, 71 J James VI of Scotland and I of England, 18–21, 76 K Kilrenny, Fife, 20, 61, 63, 64 Knox, John, 8, 89 L Lawson, James, 55, 56, 70 Linlithgow, 57 London, 21, 76 M Melville, Andrew, son of James, 20, 51–53 Melville, Andrew, uncle of James, 9, 17–19, 45, 46, 50, 55, 57, 61, 68, 81, 86 Melville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross, 10, 22, 94 Melville, Ephraim, son of James, 20, 51 Melville, Isobel, sister of James, 18, 44, 45, 86 Melville, John, son of James, 51 Melville, Margaret, daughter of James, 20, 51, 53 Melville, Richard, father of James, 17, 45, 46, 82

Montrose, 17, 19, 54, 80

N Newcastle, 19, 21, 22, 62

P prayer, 22, 61, 62, 75, 78 preaching. See worship presbyterianism, 16, 18–22, 46, 47, 49, 77, 86, 87, 94 Psalms, 22, 71 psalm-singing, 8, 71

R Rollock, Robert, 73

S Scrimgeour, Isabel, mother of James Melville, 17, 44, 45, 86 Smeton, Thomas, 55–57 Smith, James, 56, 58–60, 77, 81 Spottiswoode, John, 22 St Andrews presbytery, 58, 61 St Andrews (town), 20, 51, 55, 58, 59, 61, 68, 81 St Andrews University, 17, 18, 20, 57, 61, 69, 82

W Wod, Andrew, of Stravithie, 55 worship, 6, 8, 19, 61–64, 71, 86