357 - Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period

Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period
By Leigh Eric Schmidt
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989. 277 pp. $32.50.

This splendid book won the 1988 Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History, and readers will heartily endorse the judges' decision. The author, who teaches at Drew University, examines the development in post-Reformation Scotland of communion festivals. These "sacramental occasions" usually occurred in summer or early fall, lasted several days, and were the focal point of popular piety. Transplanted to America, the holy fairs enjoyed a wide popularity among Presbyterians until they waned (as in Scotland) in the nineteenth century. Schmidt employs ethnographic history to provide a richly

358 - Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period

textured analysis of these rituals. While alert to the larger context of the communion festivals, he avoids reducing them to mere expressions of social or cultural trends. Instead, he offers a detailed and imaginative interpretation of the ways in which these rituals made sense of the world to those who participated in them. For American church historians, the book provides a useful corrective to those who have seen revivals as cataclysmic upheavals opposed to the normal round of religious, especially sacramental, life. Schmidt demonstrates clearly that early American revivals often grew out of the sacramental occasions. This book is, in short, a major contribution to American religious history.

James H. Moorhead
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.