Database of Scottish clergy launched
The results of an international project researching the lives of clergy in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland are now available in the new online database Mapping the Scottish Reformation, which is located at maps.mappingthe scottishreformation.org.
The three-year project was a collaboration between historians based at Washington and Lee University in the USA, Newman University in Birmingham, and the University of Edinburgh.
The researchers worked to uncover records of Protestant clergymen between 1560 and 1689 – the years of the Scottish Reformation – through resources such as Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, which lists ministers of the Church of Scotland.
The result is an online map containing the names and locations of approximately 700 clerics and 400 clergy wives.
Project director Prof Michelle D Brock of Washington and Lee University explained: “We created Mapping the Scottish Reformation to provide scholars, students and genealogists with easy access to accurate, comprehensive information on the lives of the Scottish clergy.
“We hope that this tool will open up new ways of thinking about the religious, social and political roles of ministers, as individuals and as a group, in early modern Scotland.”