The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602 - 1662) Quotes

“Centuries of readership, revision and editing have shaped the Baillie that has been transmitted to us in the form of Laing's Letters and Journals. Neither a hero nor a villain, then, Baillie quietly vanished from the records he had painstakingly gathered, only to be replaced by a caricature - the dutiful letter-writer, the virulent critic, the unashamed time-server and the embarrassing vacillator. The myths that emerged to explain this period in Scottish history of regrettable violent extremism and intemperate religious belief had no place for a character like Baillie. As interest in the Covenanters declined early in the twentieth century, Baillie likewise was consigned to a place of relative neglect and those few commentators relied on recycled facts and hagiographic narratives to fill out his biography. We read, then, of Baillie's comments on a riot in Edinburgh or Baillie's description of the Solemn League and Covenant without any acknowledgement of the role that he took in the events that he had described. Through contingencies related to textual transmission and shifting historiographical trends, Baillie's life, his biography, that he so clearly and vividly detailed, has largely been forgotten. In its place, we have become accustomed to reading about the period in which Baillie lived, described by a man consigned to a footnote.”
― Alexander D. Campbell, The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602 - 1662): Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars

“Baillie's Operis Historica et Chronologici presented a sustained defence of Scripture's self-sufficiency based on the belief that the Hebrew Old Testament was the inspired and infallible Word of God.”
― Alexander D. Campbell, The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602 - 1662): Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars