A very rare survival from the Catholic Mission to Scotland. Once the Scottish Reformation established the Protestant Church of Scotland as the dominant religion, Catholics went underground and those caught practising were either imprisoned or killed. In the wake of the death of the Archbishop in Glasgow in 1603, the Roman Church designated Scotland a Missionary Territory.
Based on the 1738 Ritual, this volume was published for the use of missionary priests in Scotland. It’s little wonder that it’s so humble and small enough to be concealed in a pocket. Having said that, it “included the full instructions from the Rituale Romanum. There was no sign that the three great adjurations could be omitted, but the Epitome omitted everything between RR 905 and RR 920. Unlike the Rituale of 1738, the Epitome did not even mention the additional liturgical material included in the rite, and merely suggested the repetition of the original exorcisms. On the whole, however, these rituals for Ireland and Scotland displayed remarkably little effort to accommodate the realities of missionary life … Catholicism in Scotland was largely confined to the Highlands before the nineteenth century and presented a geographically and politically challenging field of mission” (Young).
OCLC locates copies at BL, Edinburgh, NLS, and Aberdeen. A stated London edition was printed in the same year.
Young, F., A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity (Palgrave, 2016) p.169.