Scottish Catholic Highland Missionaries in World Context

Abstract

The conventions that were employed in formal letters in the early modern period have been largely forgotten and ignored. Interpreting the surviving material has been blurred by the inclination inspired by bias to accept the stories recorded by the priests at face value, taking for unvarnished truth material shaped by the formulaic expectations of the day.1 This paper aims to examine how far the available writings on Scottish Catholic missionary life in the Highlands should be discounted as representing not perfect truth but conventional fiction heavily influenced by the usage established for such writing by the bigger and more powerful Catholic world missions.