Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned? The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives. Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century. This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.

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Works on Scottish church history have sometimes been described as parochial, partisan, outdated or unscholarly. John McIntosh remedies this. He diverts attention from the Moderate Party in the eighteenth century, with its focus on the small group of Edinburgh literati, to the unexpectedly broad-based Popular Party, which opposed patronage in the Church of Scotland and included all shades of theological and political opinion. As well as delineating the evolving theological re-alignment which led eventually to the nineteenth-century evangelical revivals and contributed much to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, John McIntosh sees the emergence of an intellectually confident grouping of ministers – orthodox Evangelicals but 'Enlightened' thinkers – as the most significant feature of the eighteenth-century Church. He also considers the responses of the Church of Scotland to the Scottish Enlightenment, to the American and French Revolutions and their associated ideas, and to the social implications of the Industrial Revolution. The Church of Scotland in this period touched the lives of city lawyers, urban merchants, lowland farmers and highland crofters alike. This book is therefore recommended reading for social and political historians as well as students of church history and theology.

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