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‘To Whom Say You Your Pater Noster?’: Prayer on the Eve of the Scottish Reformation

ABSTRACT In 1551, a resident English Dominican, Richard Marshall, sparked a fierce controversy in St Andrews, Scotland, by arguing in a sermon that the Lord’s Prayer, the ‘Our Father’, should be prayed to God only and not to the saints. According to John Foxe, the dispute led to much cursing, a regional synod, and one Franciscan fleeing the city in disgrace. The St Andrews quarrel was one of many controversies about prayer in sixteenth-century Europe. Why was prayer such a contentious topic? Scottish prayer controversies revealed a fundamental struggle between traditional and reformist views over the value of ritual in relating to God. Protestants like George Wishart, Catholic reformers like Marshall and Archbishop John Hamilton, and more radical ‘devotional humanists’ like the poet, Sir David Lindsay, proclaimed new understandings of prayer that undermined the structures of traditional devotion by pitting the personal and vernacular aspect of prayer against priestly Latin ritual.