Records of the Scottish Church History Society 38 (2008) 5–22 ISSN 0264-5572 “I do disclaim both Ecclesiasticke and Politick Popery”: Lay Catholic Identity in Early Modern Scotland R. SCOTT SPURLOCK, B.A., M.Th., M.Sc., Ph.D. A survey of recent Scottish Catholic historiography raises two important issues. First, there is a rather surprising dearth of scholarship relating to the important cultural, historical and sociological influences of the Roman Catholic Church upon the life of the nation. A handful of works have been produced in the last decade or so, but the majority of these tend to focus on sectarianism or the modern sociological issue of Catholicism in relation to ethnic identity. 1 Second, what works have been produced on the historical experience of Catholicism in Scotland in the past century overwhelmingly tend to focus on one of two aspects: either the policies of the post-Reformation Protestant establishment to eradicate Roman Catholicism in Scotland, such as Allan Macinnes’s very valuable work on Catholic recusants and penal laws and more recently Clotilde Prunier’s Anti-catholic Strategies In Eighteenth- century Scotland; or, the institutions of the Catholic Church in Scotland and Scots’ involvement abroad such as John Watt’s 1999 study of the seminary at Scalan, Michael Yellowlees’s So Strange a Monster as a Jesuite which looks at the Jesuit missions in Scotland during the sixteenth century, or the several recent works on the Scots continental 1 Raymond Boyle and Peter Lynch (eds), Out of the ghetto?: The Catholic community in modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1998); Steve Bruce, Tony Glendinning, Iain Paterson and Michael Rosie (eds), Sectarianism in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2004); Michael Rosie, The Sectarian Myth in Scotland: Of Bitter Memory and Bigotry (Basingstoke, 2004).