Rethinking the Scottish Revolution

This book provides a new framework for understanding the complex period of political and religious disruption in Scotland from 1637 to 1651. For decades, scholars have relied on David Stevenson’s high-political account of the period. I would not suggest that you discard your copies of Stevenson’s The Scottish Revolution 1637–44 (1973) and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (1977) just yet, but Laura Stewart has provided a convincing thematic reappraisal of the period updated to sit comfortably within current historiography. Stewart’s analysis is refreshingly cosmopolitan. She engages meaningfully with historiographies from English, Irish and Continental European contexts. Scholars of these other regions’ histories too often neglect Scottish history because it can appear parochial. But, as Stewart’s volume affirms time and again, they would do well to attend to her conclusions. The book is divided into two sections—‘The Making of Covenanted Scotland’ and ‘Covenanted Scotland’—comprising three chapters each, alongside a lengthy introduction and conclusion. Stewart’s analysis develops from an understanding of politics as a ‘dynamic and inherently unstable process in which different social groups negotiate the inequalities of power relations’. Through the Prayer Book crisis, new groups, hitherto silent, were drawn into dialogue about power and authority, and those elites in power were forced to justify a ‘more expansive, and coercive state’. The Covenanted state may have failed by 1651, but not before its elite had permanently transformed early modern Scottish political culture. There is clearly a lot of material to cover and, at points, the balance between exposition and argument is off kilter—too many words are spent rehearsing historiography or too few words used to explain an important historical event

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