The History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland

Knox’s editor David Laing argues from the text and the manuscripts that part of the second book was written at the end of 1559 and most of the first and fourth books in 1566, with marginal notes added as late as 1571. The four books that are his carry the story from the first Protestant preachers in Scotland to 1564; a fifth book printed under his name in 1644 is of doubtful authorship. An attempt to print the History in London in 1586 or 1587 was stopped and the copies seized.

Knox took part in much of what he describes, and he copies into his narrative petitions, acts of Parliament, the Scots Confession and the First Book of Discipline. He writes as a partisan and says so. His opponents are “Papists” and their worship “idolatry”; Mary, Queen of Scots, and her mother the regent are drawn as enemies of the truth; and his own conversations with the queen are reported by him alone. The History has to be read as one side’s account of the Scottish Reformation.