Reforming the Scottish Church: John Winram (c. 1492-1582) and the Example of Fife (review)

182 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Part Three of the collection ‘Cultural Contexts for Early Drama’ begins with an essay exploring the familiar medieval context of holidays and Holy Days. Titled ‘Carnival, Lent and Early English Drama’ the essay is largely a survey of ‘recent’ scholarship of the kind that relies on a ‘Carnival vs. Lent paradigm’ (p. 213) for medieval English drama. Davidson is convincing in his assertion that Bakhtin’s vision of carnival is somewhat utopian, or ‘romanticized’ (p. 209) and therefore not a dialectical opposite to Lent restrictions. Yet, despite the reworking of this essay for recent publication, the survey of extant criticism that draws on such a dialectic is somewhat dated. Overall the essay is once again too dismissive of alternative readings and ultimately re-claims the medieval drama for a narrow Catholic context, in much the same approach applied to the Renaissance drama. One work missing from Davidson’s survey here is the recent publication by Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play and Game: English festive culture in the medieval and early modern period (2000). This book offers itself as a good companion piece to the final section of Davidson’s collection as both are concerned with medieval anti-theatrical prejudice; critical misunderstandings of the diversity of medieval drama; and a concerted challenge to traditional notions of a linear evolution of English drama. Davidson’s work is not as well-considered or as satisfying as Clopper’s work. It is, however, quite similar in its unsubstantiated claim of presenting a viable ‘context’ for Renaissance drama. The medieval context offered by Davidson is also somewhat narrow, but should be of value to those readers interested in the Catholic imperatives of the drama, but with little interest in the social contexts of plays produced in England between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Craig Allan Horton English Program La Trobe University Dunbar, Linda J., Reforming the Scottish Church: John Winram (c. 1492 – 1582) and the Example of Fife (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. xx, 239; 8 b/w illustrations, 1 map; RRP£49.50; ISBN 0754603431. By her examination of the life of John Winram, pre-Reformation sub-prior of St Andrews Augustinian Priory and post-Reformation Superintendent of Fife Reviews 183 Parergon 20.2 (2003) in the Reformed Church, Linda Dunbar illuminates the momentous religious changes that occurred in sixteenth-century Scotland. Yet her material, perhaps partly because much of it has been hard won from early records, partly because Dunbar’s aims (covering both the general and the biographical) are so ambitious, is at times insufficiently digested, with the resultant focus not as sharp as it could be. For instance the highly detailed documentation of the General Assembly’s working out of the national functions of superintendency for the Reformed Church, which forms the main matter of Chapter Four, is not linked to Winram’s particular role as Superintendent of Fife until the final sentence. The reduction and integration of the material in this chapter (valuable though it is in itself) with that of the following chapter Five, ‘The practice and superintendency in Fife’, might have achieved a tighter structural and thematic result, the better to achieve the purpose declared in the book’s title. For the same reasons, Dunbar sometimes takes a stance about Winram’s motives without apparently providing along with it the essential supporting evidence, or the vital sentences necessary to link it to that evidence. At the beginning of Chapter Nine (‘St Andrews priory after 1560’), for example, she states, without immediately adding her proof, that Winram’s ‘[p]ragmatism, not cronyism’ lay behind his appointments to the new parishes of canons from St Andrews rather than elsewhere (p. 138). In the shade of that omission of proof, Dunbar’s next assertion that ‘Winram would have been keen to staff the churches in his district with men he knew and trusted’ seems untrustworthy, and the following equally contentious remark, that ‘the reform-minded canons who had flooded the priory in the 1550s would have been keen to serve under the man who led them…before the Reformation’ (p. 138), makes matters worse. The impression of subjective interpretion is...