This is the third volume in The History of the Scottish Parliament. In volumes 1 and 2 the contributors addressed discrete episodes in political history from the early thirteenth century through to 1707, demonstrating the richness of the sources for such historical writing and the importance of parliament to that history. In Volume 3 the contributors have built on that foundation and taken advantage of the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to discuss a comprehensive range of key themes in the development of parliament. The editors, Keith M. Brown and Alan R. MacDonald, have assembled a team of established and younger scholars who each discuss a theme that ranges over the entire six centuries of the parliament's existence. These include broad, interpretive chapters on each of the key political constituencies represented in parliament. Thus Roland Tanner and Gillian MacIntosh write on parliament and the crown, Roland Tanner and Kirsty McAlister discuss parliament and the church, Keith Brown addresses parliament and the nobility and Alan MacDonald examines parliament and the burghs. Cross-cutting themes are also analysed. The political culture of parliament is the subject of a chapter by Julian Goodare, while parliament and the law, political ideas and social control are dealt with in turn by Mark Godfrey, James Burns and Alastair Mann. Finally, parliament's own procedures are also discussed by Alastair Mann. The History of the Scottish Parliament: Parliament in Context offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the workings and significance of this important institution to the history of late medieval and early modern Scotland.

"[Volume 2] describes its role in the reign of James VI and throughout the century between the unions of the crowns in 1603 and of the parliaments in 1707, a period of royal absenteeism, religious upheaval, revolutions, civil wars, and economic catastrophe."--Publisher description.

Written by some twenty-five leading scholars, this is the first of three volumes which will be by far the most comprehensive history of the parliament ever published.

Existing studies of early modern Scotland tend to focus on the crown, the nobility and the church. Yet, from the sixteenth century, a unique national representative assembly of the towns, the Convention of Burghs, provides an insight into the activities of another key group in society. Meeting at least once a year, the Convention consisted of representatives from every parliamentary burgh, and was responsible for apportioning taxation, settling disputes between members, regulating weights and measures, negotiating with the crown on issues of concern to the merchant community. The Convention's role in relation to parliament was particularly significant, for it regulated urban representation, admitted new burghs to parliament, and co-ordinated and oversaw the conduct of the burgess estate in parliament. In this, the first full-length study of the burghs and parliament in Scotland, the influence of this institution is fully analysed over a one hundred year period. Drawing extensively on local and national sources, this book sheds new light upon the way in which parliament acted as a point of contact, a place where legislative business was done, relationships formed and status affirmed. The interactions between centre and localities, and between urban and rural elites are prominent themes, as is Edinburgh's position as the leading burgh and the host of parliament. The study builds upon existing scholarship to place Scotland within the wider British and European context and argues that the Scottish parliament was a distinctive and effective institution which was responsive to the needs of the burghs both collectively and individually.

Conventional accounts of the Scottish Highlands tend to assume that they remained detached from the mainstream of British affairs until well into the eighteenth century. In Governing Gaeldom, Allan Kennedy challenges this perception through detailed analysis of the relationship between the Highlands and the Scottish state during the reigns of Charles II and James VII & II. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, Kennedy traces the political, social, ecclesiastical and economic linkages between centre and periphery, demonstrating that the Highlands were much more tightly integrated than hitherto assumed. At the same time, he reconstructs the development of Highland policy, placing it within its proper context of the absolutist pretensions of the late-Stuart monarchy. The result is a thorough reinterpretation which offers fresh insights into the process of state-formation in early-modern Britain. The volume has been awarded the Frank Watson Book Prize for 2015. For more details see: https://www.uoguelph.ca/scottish/frank_watson This title is shortlisted for the Saltire Society 2014 History Book of the Year Award. For more details see: http://www.saltiresociety.org.uk/awards/literature/literary-awards/scottish-history-book-of-the-year/2014-history-book-shortlist/

This book, based on a fresh understanding of Scottish governmental records rooted in extensive archival research, offers the first study of these important institutions in a period of revived royal authority. The regime which emerges from these records is one which understood the power of consultation, adroitly using a range of groups from full parliaments to conventions of specialists and experts selected to deal with the matter in hand. Policies were crafted through not one single meeting but several types of gathering, ranging from small groups when secrecy was of the essence or complex details required to be hammered out, to elaborate large gatherings when the regime employed a performative strategy to disseminate information or legitimise its policies. Still more impressively, much of this was managed in the King’s absence – James remained at a distance from many of these gatherings, relying on key officials such as the Chancellor or Clerk Register to relay counsel and the royal will. This emphasis on specialised, frequent consultation reflects concurrent developments in the council, whilst relocating debate surrounding the development of state and administrative structures in Scotland traditionally located in the late sixteenth-century into the 1530s. In tackling the development of parliament in Scotland and placing it in its proper context amongst many different forms of consultative meeting this book also speaks to subjects of European-wide concern: how far early modern Parliaments were used to impose or resist religious change, the pace of state formation, monarchical power and relations between monarchs and their subjects.

The English revolution is one of the most intensely-debated events in history; parallel events in Scotland have never attracted the same degree of interest. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution argues for a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century Scottish revolution that goes beyond questions about its radicalism, and reconsiders its place within an overarching 'British' narrative. In this volume, Laura Stewart analyses how interactions between print and manuscript polemic, crowds, and political performances enabled protestors against a Prayer Book to destroy Charles I's Scottish government. Particular attention is given to the way in which debate in Scotland was affected by the emergence of London as a major publishing centre. The subscription of the 1638 National Covenant occurred within this context and further politicized subordinate social groups that included women. Unlike in England, however, public debate was contained. A remodelled constitution revivified the institutions of civil and ecclesiastical governance, enabling Covenanted Scotland to pursue interventionist policies in Ireland and England - albeit at terrible cost to the Scottish people. War transformed the nature of state power in Scotland, but this achievement was contentious and fragile. A key weakness lay in the separation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, which justified for some a strictly conditional understanding of obedience to temporal authority. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution explores challenges to legitimacy of the Covenanted constitution, but qualifies the idea that Scotland was set on a course to destruction as a result. Covenanted government was overthrown by the new model army in 1651, but its ideals persisted. In Scotland as well as England, the language of liberty, true religion, and the public interest had justified resistance to Charles I. The Scottish revolution embedded a distinctive and durable political culture that ultimately proved resistant to assimilation into the nascent British state.