Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and covenanting in a seventeenth-century Scottish town (Manchester University Press, 2024)
Using a wide range of archival material and a microhistorical approach, Plagues of the heart explores the formation, practice and performance of protestant identity amid the interlocking crises of the seventeenth century. Taking the southwestern port city of Ayr as a remarkable but revealing case study, this book argues that under the stewardship of a generation of radical clergy, Scotland developed a distinct and durable 'culture of covenanting'. This compelling story of one Scottish town and its long-serving minister offers a fresh understanding of how protestant communities across the early modern world grappled with religion and identity during a remarkably tumultuous age.
The Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition (Routledge, 2025)
This volume, co-edited with Richard Raiswell and David Winter, features nearly thirty chapters that trace the idea of the devil and its implications and consequences from the early Christian tradition to the twenty-first century. Collectively, these chapters argue that the devil has been integral to the construction of “western society” and its sense of itself from the start of the first millennium. This book, then, is an exploration of the devil as a defining feature of the western imagination. It is also a history of the anti-west—the west as seen through its anxieties, fears and attempts to define and police itself and its boundaries.
Satan and the Scots, c.1560-1700: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland (Routledge, 2016)
Exploring what it meant to live in a world in which Satan’s presence was believed to be, and indeed, perceived to be, ubiquitous, this book recreates the role of the Devil in the mental worlds of the Scottish people from the Reformation through the early eighteenth century. In so doing it is both the first history of the devil in Scotland and a case study of the profound ways that beliefs about evil can change lives and shape whole societies.
Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period, edited with Richard Raiswell and David Winter (Palgrave, 2018)
This book explores the manifold ways of knowing—and knowing about—preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled invisibly but meaningfully in the spaces just beyond (and occasionally within) the limits of human perception. The volume demonstrates that an understanding of the nature and capabilities of spirits, whether benevolent or malevolent, was fundamental to the knowledge-making practices that characterize the years between ca. 1500 and 1750.
