Creating a Scottish church

S. Karly Kehoe is Lecturer in History at Glasgow Caledonian University

• Introduction1. Scotland’s Catholic Church before Emancipation2. Reinventing strategies: Coping with change3. The recruitment of women religious4. Constructing of a system of education5. Consolidating Catholicity: Devotion, association and community6. ConclusionBibliographyIndex

Historians, teachers, and a wider community in Scotland and beyond will welcome this considerable contribution to our understanding of the complex creation of a scottish churchLesley Orr, University of Edinburgh, Scottish Literary Review, 02/02/2012Kehoe’s study, meticulously researched and well-written, is of particular importance for two reasons. First, it addresses the general neglect of Catholicism in the historiography of religion in Scotland… Second, it combines exploration of gender, ethnicity and class, promoting understanding of both the essential role of women in the Catholic Church and of how the church was transformed into an institution visibly active in the public sphere that worked to secure and safeguard a distinctly Scottish national identity and civil society.Tanja Bueltmann, Scottish Historical ReviewThis book is one of a burgeoning number of recent works on female religious in various orders and countries, but the detail and national scope of this study make it a very valuable addition to this field, and to the areas of Scottish nationalism and nineteenth-century British church history.Rowan Strong, Journal of Ecclesiastical HistoryThis commendable inquiry into the ways in which a religious minority retained a sense of its own distinctiveness while seeking to incorporate itself into civic society and the national narrative, charts new territory in the historiography and reminds the reader that debates about migration and its effects on a nation’s religious and political landscape have a longstanding genealogy.Alana Harris, Lincoln College, University of Oxford, Reviews in HistoryThe focus on women religions and their impact on Catholic ideas, educational and social welfare and, ultimately, their role in the re-imagining of Scottish Catholic identity means that this book is essential reading for students, academics and for all those with an interest in Scottish Catholic history. This book will have an enormous influence on any subsequent thinking and research into nineteenth-century Catholicism.Stephen McKinney, University of Glasgow, Expository TimesIt has been easy in the past to ignore the efforts of Scottish Catholic women. Karly Kehoe's scrupulously researched and thoughtful book has now made this much more difficult. Kehoe's work in the private archives of religious institutes and the Scottish Catholic Archives has done a great service to historians of Scottish history.