Project MUSE®: The Scottish Historical Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Scottish Historical Review.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 85 (2006) - vol. 87 (2008)Latest Articles: The Scottish Historical ReviewTWOProject MUSE®The Scottish Historical Review1750-02220036-9241Latest articles in The Scottish Historical Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Calculation of Columba’s Arrival in Britain in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Pictish King-lists
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255220
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In book III chapter 4 of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (HE), Bede wrote that St Columba arrived in Britain from Ireland in a.d. 565 in order to convert the Picts, and in return for this he was given Iona by those he had evangelised.2 This episode was an aside from Bede’s narrative account of the conversion of the Northumbrians, but it was significant to Bede in terms of his overall message, since the monks of Iona were later rewarded for their missionary activity among the Anglo-Saxons in 716 when the Northumbrian monk Ecgberht persuaded the Iona community to change their method of calculating Easter and their style of tonsure. Columba’s arrival in Britain is dated to a.d. 565 and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Calculation of Columba’s Arrival in Britain in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Pictish King-lists2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Calculation of Columba’s Arrival in Britain in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Pictish King-lists2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®1843182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Scots and Galwegians in the ‘peoples address’ of Scottish Royal Charters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255221
<p></p>
I will open with the addresses in two charters of David I. One is to Newbattle Abbey, the other to Kelso Abbey. Both concern grants of a saltpan in the carse-lands of East Stirlingshire. Despite little difference in purpose, their addresses are strikingly different.
David Rex Scottorum, omnibus probis hominibus tocius terre sue, salutem.3
(David, king of Scots, to all the worthy men of his whole land, greeting.)
D. dei gracia Rex Scott’, episcopis, abbatibus, comitibus, baronibus, vicecomitibus, justiciis, prepositis, ministris, et omnibus probis hominibus tocius regni sui, Francis, Anglicis et Scottis, salutem.4
(David, by the grace of God king of Scots, to bishops, abbots, earls
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallScots and Galwegians in the ‘peoples address’ of Scottish Royal Charters2008-12-11text/htmlen-USScots and Galwegians in the ‘peoples address’ of Scottish Royal Charters2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®1303532026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11A Kingdom Cleared of Castles: The Role of the Castle in the Campaigns of Robert Bruce
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255222
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In early 1314, upon being informed that the English-held castles of Edinburgh and Roxburgh had fallen to the Scots, the contemporary biographer of Edward II related that the English king was in such distress he ‘could scarcely restrain his tears’1 Edward certainly had good reason to weep for both Edinburgh and Roxburgh were first-rate castles, their garrisons had been well-manned by English troops, and great effort and expense had gone into their continued maintenance in terms of both wages and victuals. That both fell to assault within weeks of one another must have increased Edward’s dismay.2 His distress upon receiving the subsequent news of the Scottish siege of Stirling Castle can only be imagined. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallA Kingdom Cleared of Castles: The Role of the Castle in the Campaigns of Robert Bruce2008-12-11text/htmlen-USA Kingdom Cleared of Castles: The Role of the Castle in the Campaigns of Robert Bruce2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®1551392026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11From Enquiry to Improvement: David Ure (1749–1798)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255223
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David Ure was the author of a notable History of Rutherglen and East-Kilbride and played a pioneering part in the development of palaeontology in Scotland.1 Only for the last two years or so of a comparatively short life was he a ‘placed minister’ of the Church of Scotland (though he had spent seven years as assistant in one of the parishes dealt with in his History). Throughout his career, however, both by choice and of necessity, much of his abundant energy was devoted to scientific and statistical enquiry.2 That career is all the more remarkable when Ure’s early circumstances and the course of his education are considered. His is one of the of those cases in which the Scottish myth of ‘the lad o’ pairts’
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallFrom Enquiry to Improvement: David Ure (1749–1798)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USFrom Enquiry to Improvement: David Ure (1749–1798)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®1119312026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11‘A Very Dangerous Place’?: Radicalism in Perth in the 1790s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255224
<p></p>
This article offers a much needed case study of reform activity in a provincial Scottish town over an extended time scale, and emphasises the need for further studies of the reform activities of the Scots beyond the more familiar centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow. In a recent article Bob Harris has surveyed loyalism and radicalism in Angus and Perthshire in the 1790s.2 However, this article concentrates exclusively on radicalism in Perth, considering the town’s importance in both a local and national context, and exploring the roots of the reform movement which developed in the 1790s. It will highlight the continuity of support for reform from the 1780s into the early nineteenth century, arguing that the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmall‘A Very Dangerous Place’?: Radicalism in Perth in the 1790s2008-12-11text/htmlen-US‘A Very Dangerous Place’?: Radicalism in Perth in the 1790s2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®1883232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11The Fasces and the Saltire: The Failure of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland, 1932–1940
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255225
<p></p>
The history of the British Union of Fascists [BUF] continues to attract a good deal of academic attention. In recent years, some notable new work has appeared on both the movement and its founder and leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. A new biography by Stephen Dorril appeared in 2006, with the declared aim of addressing what the author felt was the over-sympathetic picture of the fascist leader created by Robert Skidelsky’s Oswald Mosley.1 Richard Thurlow has continued his longtime work in the field, updating what is, in many respects, the standard text on the subject, Fascism in Britain, and incorporating new work into his recent Fascism in Modern Britain.2 Younger historians have tackled other aspects of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Fasces and the Saltire: The Failure of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland, 1932–19402008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Fasces and the Saltire: The Failure of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland, 1932–19402008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®1327792026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Neolithic Scotland: Timber, Stone, Earth and Fire (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255226
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As Gordon Noble states in his introduction, this is an exciting era for Neolithic studies and this volume is a very readable review of the Neolithic period in Scotland and a synthesis of current research for those with an interest in the subject. Dated between 4000 and 2500 BC, the Neolithic is defined by the adoption of new lifeways and their distinctive material expression in the archaeological record. Economies are based on domesticated plants and animals rather than wild resources as in the preceding Mesolithic; novel technologies such as pottery are adopted and there are also shifts in the character of stonecraft and lithic technology. One of the most salient changes is the emergence of timber and stone
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallNeolithic Scotland: Timber, Stone, Earth and Fire (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USNeolithic Scotland: Timber, Stone, Earth and Fire (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®53882026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Able Minds and Practiced Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the 21st Century (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255227
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The year 2003 marked one hundred years since the publication of Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (ECMS) by J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson. This monumental work of scholarship placed research on Scotland’s antiquities at the forefront of Europe. Its minute thoroughness seems to have stalled further excursions into the field for fully a generation. But, after a century, other countries, particularly England, Wales and Ireland, have caught up and Scotland is once more in need of a modern corpus which will include all the new discoveries and changing approaches of the twenty-first century.
This book, with twenty-six papers, is the result of a conference organised by Historic Scotland and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallAble Minds and Practiced Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the 21st Century (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USAble Minds and Practiced Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the 21st Century (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®94312026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Plantagenet England 1225–1360 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255228
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As might be expected from Michael Prestwich, this is a masterly survey of English politics and society during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It opens with a discussion of kingship and government before providing a chronological analysis of English politics. This section is also interspersed with chapters on English interests, mostly military and political, in Wales, Scotland and France which absorbed a fair proportion of the English crown’s resources during this period. Though the book opens with politics and war, nearly half the book is given over to an analysis of English society with chapters dealing with nobility, gentry, urban society, trade, crime and the peasantry amongst other topics.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallPlantagenet England 1225–1360 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USPlantagenet England 1225–1360 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®61562026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255229
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Katie Stevenson’s monograph delivers on the considerable promise of her doctoral thesis. It provides an excellent beginning in the examination of a universal medieval experience in a hitherto neglected Scottish context, as the introductory historiographical survey makes plain.
By taking Maurice Keen’s seminal definition of chivalry as its starting point – with a focus upon the inter-twined martial, aristocratic and Christian elements of the medieval chivalric ideal – this book presents a convincing thematic exploration of chivalry and knighthood in Scotland during the reigns of successive and strongly contrasted Stewart monarchs, James I to James IV. This approach aids the illustration of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallChivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USChivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®95422026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Calendar of Papal Letters relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Volume XX, 1513–1521, Leo X, Lateran Registers, Part I (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255230
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This latest volume in the impressive series the Calendar of Papal Letters starts with the opening of Leo X’s pontificate in 1513 and goes down to 1521. It brings us one step closer to being able to utilise to the full the remarkable riches that lie within the Vatican archives. Although only 11 per cent of the items within this substantial tome directly concern Scotland, those items are comparatively longer and more helpful than the majority of entries dealing with English and Welsh affairs. Being part of the routine business of papal administration, the documents produced by the Papal Chancery produce few surprises in their content. Their great value lies in the biographical and topographical information
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallCalendar of Papal Letters relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Volume XX, 1513–1521, Leo X, Lateran Registers, Part I (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USCalendar of Papal Letters relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Volume XX, 1513–1521, Leo X, Lateran Registers, Part I (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®42172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Mission to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255231
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Christianity among the ‘Gaels’ in the age of Reformation is the kind of subject which might worry the thinking of all manner of historians. Big, bold Reformation-era questions about the role of vernacular languages, whether in preaching, printing or Bible translation, take on a very particular colouring confronted with a language (or languages) with limited access to print, distinctive literary traditions, and facing awkward, if not downright hostile, attitudes on the part of states, or state-sponsored churches, in Scotland and in Ireland. Or there are the questions which arise concerning the interaction of patterns of faith and the particular social structures and political order within Gaelic Ireland and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallMission to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USMission to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®115002026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Seawolves: Pirates and the Scots (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255232
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Piracy is one of those very peculiar aspects of maritime history. Robbery on the open sea has been a feature of the nautical world since the time man first took to the seas in boats. Yet for all that it remains a subject which is difficult for the scholar to address, not least due to the romantic notions and erroneous assumptions which attach themselves to the subject. Academics who teach this subject brace themselves at the start of each new class in anticipation of the students and the variety of expectations they bring to the course. This is not helped by articles, seldom scholarly, which even try to place certain pirates of the Golden Age at the epicentre of communities striving for equality and justice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallSeawolves: Pirates and the Scots (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USSeawolves: Pirates and the Scots (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®67092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11The Scots and the Union (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255233
<p></p>
The Jacobites always had the best tunes, even before Burns and Hogg got to work on them. We sang them every week at primary school. We also learnt about the Cameronians and the conventicles and the Killing Times. They were against the Union too. Like many SHR readers I was brought up in the culturally nationalist but politically unionist Scotland created by Sir Walter Scott, where Cameronian and Jacobite rubbed shoulders as fellow enemies of the parcel of rogues in the nation who created the Union of 1707.
It is all rubbish of course. This is not now news to readers of this journal. But it is strange that not until the tercentenary of Union do we get an academic monograph that devotes 424 pages to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Scots and the Union (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Scots and the Union (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®115662026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 127. Anglo-Scottish Relations, from 1603 to 1900, and: Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 128. Anglo-Scottish Relations: from 1900 to Devolution and Beyond (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255234
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These two volumes were designed to commemorate the quatercentenary of the regnal union of 1603. They sit together like unidentical twins, and the result is less than the sum of their two parts. Perhaps this is inevitable. Chris Smout’s volume, in suggesting that the Union can be analysed as a succession of phases in which a variety of strategies were used to solve both the internal and external relations of ‘these islands’, suggests a maturity of vision within the discipline of history and an optimistic world-view in which, perhaps, some of these skills and conventions can be deployed in a European arena. By contrast William Miller’s second volume, more about the last thirty years than about the long (or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallProceedings of the British Academy, Volume 127. Anglo-Scottish Relations, from 1603 to 1900, and: Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 128. Anglo-Scottish Relations: from 1900 to Devolution and Beyond (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USProceedings of the British Academy, Volume 127. Anglo-Scottish Relations, from 1603 to 1900, and: Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 128. Anglo-Scottish Relations: from 1900 to Devolution and Beyond (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®205112026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255235
<p></p>
It is now more than a century since the publication of Sir William Laird Clowes’s seven volume History of the Royal Navy, the first and for many years the only attempt to write what was both an institutional history dating from the sixteenth century and more broadly, an account of war at sea since the Roman conquest. It has served naval historians well but for some time has required a comprehensive and scholarly successor. Now with the support of the Oxford Maritime Trust, the National Maritime Museum, the Society for Nautical Research and the Navy Records Society Professor Nicholas Rodger has set out to write a new synthesis of British naval history.
Command of the Ocean is the second of a three
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®64722026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11The Governing of Britain, 1688–1848: the executive, Parliament and the people (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255236
<p></p>
It was a great sadness to hear that Peter Jupp had died soon after this, his last book, had been published and sent out for review. It is the culmination of his scholarly lifetime’s research and publication in the field of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century political history. Jupp has provided here a massive general survey of the working of parliament and the executive and of the ways in which they interacted with each other and the public over a period longer than that traditionally known as the ‘long eighteenth century’. More significantly, it covers in detail the ways in which Britain was governed as her position as an international power was transformed into a dominant role. It shows how she
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Governing of Britain, 1688–1848: the executive, Parliament and the people (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Governing of Britain, 1688–1848: the executive, Parliament and the people (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®63892026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Edinburgh: The Making of a Capital City (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255237
<p></p>
Edinburgh: The Making of a Capital City is not so much a celebration of Edinburgh’s past as a passionate and serious-minded attempt to secure its future as a dynamic capital city of global significance, written by a group of expert researchers who clearly care a great deal about their subject. In this regard, it represents a welcome departure from traditional approaches to the history of Edinburgh that commemorate her ‘golden age’ (usually dated to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of course) or perpetuate the romantic mystique of ‘Auld Reekie’. Contributors instead take a broad historical sweep, ‘warts and all’, to present what is expressly intended to be a statement of recent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallEdinburgh: The Making of a Capital City (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USEdinburgh: The Making of a Capital City (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®83712026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255238
<p></p>
As the introduction to this volume states, there has indeed been an ‘impressive amount of Scottish historical writing in recent years’. In that category, not least have been tomes focused particularly on Scottish women and their contributions to the nation’s history and culture, ranging from collections such as A History of Scottish Women’s Writing and An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets to individual studies, such as Pamela Ritchie’s Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: A Political Career and John Guy’s My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots. With The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, the editors and the numerous contributing authors do an admirable job of reclaiming the sometimes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®74052026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255239
<p></p>
Female serial killers, women suicide bombers and the increasing number, and escalating violence, of girl gangs in the late twentieth century force us to question powerful cultural stereotypes that women are inherently non-aggressive. Women are more commonly cast as the victim of violent behaviour, not the aggressor, and yet female violence, which is still regarded as an aberration, is not a recent phenomenon as Kilday’s book on lowland women’s violent criminality between 1750 and 1815 makes clear. Using the records of the Scottish Justiciary Court, which indicted the most violent offenders and a disproportionate number of female criminals, Kilday argues that in contrast to popular belief, women’s violent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallWomen and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USWomen and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®69182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255240
<p></p>
The historiography of Irish Presbyterianism, like that of other churches, has been dominated both by functionalist critiques, subordinating issues of faith to wider explanatory frameworks, and by local celebratory approaches. Irish Presbyterians have generated their own extensive literature, much of it produced in glorification of individual congregations or ministers (Holmes comments on the Presbyterian passion for parish history), but also with a leavening of more widely researched and scholarly work (undertaken by the likes of John Barkley and Finlay Holmes). Another body of research, often originating from beyond the Presbyterian communion, has sought to link the development of the church in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThe Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®84592026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11These Fissured Isles: Ireland, Scotland and British History, 1798–1848 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255241
<p></p>
This collection of thirteen essays, generated from a conference held at the University of Aberdeen in 1999, makes an important and considerable contribution to the discovery and reinterpretation of British national identity after the watershed year of 1798. These Fissured Isles confronts the ‘self-perception of class identity and class struggle’ (p. 258) within the wider context of five specific themes: Ireland, Scotland and the British Questions; The Horizons of Women; Conservatism and Culture in Scotland; Chartism Revisited; and The Past, the Present and the People. As the title suggests, the compilation examines the subtle and obvious causes of national fragmentation along cultural, social, economic, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallThese Fissured Isles: Ireland, Scotland and British History, 1798–1848 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USThese Fissured Isles: Ireland, Scotland and British History, 1798–1848 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®81742026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Gathering to His Name: The Story of the Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255242
<p></p>
This book charts the history of the Open Brethren, an evangelical movement of spiritual renewal that had its roots in the south west of England and in Dublin in the 1820s. The Brethren are a fascinating lot of detached and privileged evangelicals. They did not regard themselves as a denomination, were strongly opposed to distinctive labels, had no official headquarters and were reluctant to identify any official movement leaders. Tim Grass organises this book of twenty-four chapters into four sections.
Part one, ‘1825–1849: A United Testimony’ details the movement’s emergence, early leadership and the ideological differences and personality clashes that led to the movement splitting into the Open
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallGathering to His Name: The Story of the Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USGathering to His Name: The Story of the Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®69302026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255243
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This is an outstandingly good book (the fourteenth in the series of Scottish Historical Review Monographs) by a very capable young scholar who is training for the ministry of the Free Presbyterian Church. That last point matters. Virtually every historian who has written about agrarian and social change in the nineteenth-century Highlands, myself included, has recognised the extent to which such change was bound up with the spread and consolidation – among the crofting population above all – of evangelical Presbyterianism. Few or none of us, however, have explored evangelicalism’s role from a standpoint firmly inside that faith. Allan MacColl most definitely does so. This is one of his book’s strengths.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallLand, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893 (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USLand, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893 (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®69132026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Lord Cockburn: Selected Letters (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255244
<p></p>
Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn, was a man hugely aware of the fate of his own manuscript reminiscences. His reputation as a man of letters and as a leading celebrity of nineteenth-century Edinburgh life rest principally on the posthumous Memorials of His Time (1856), still cherished as an insider’s nostalgic account of the lost era of the Scottish literati. But Cockburn was also a great letter writer, and his voluminous unpublished correspondence can be used to complement and flesh out important aspects of his published work, having the added advantage that they were not compiled explicitly for posterity. Cockburn wrote letters for many reasons: to keep in touch with friends and relatives; to seek or proffer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallLord Cockburn: Selected Letters (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USLord Cockburn: Selected Letters (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®77722026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255245
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In 1874 Oscar Wilde wrote to John Stuart Blackie to announce a forthcoming visit to Edinburgh and declared that ‘the man who comes to Scotland without scenting the heather on the mountain, or talking to you among your books, misses what is best in the land’ (p. 304). Wilde’s view was not eccentric: Blackie was regarded as the great representative of Scottish culture, his conversation a national treasure. When he died obituaries suggested that the old Scotland itself had passed away: ‘The race of the individual, the original, the vernacular, ends (does it?) with him’, wrote Mrs Oliphant in Blackwood’s. Stuart Wallace, however, finds the comparisons that were made at the time with Scott, Carlyle and Stevenson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallJohn Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot (review)2008-12-11text/htmlen-USJohn Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot (review)2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®107262026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Contents
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255246
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Articles
183 The Calculation of Columba’s Arrival in Britain in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Pictish King-lists
Nicholas Evans
1 Bede, the Firth of Forth, and the Location of Urbs Iudeu
James E. Fraser
26 When Onomastics Met Archaeology: A Tale of Two Hinbas
Pamela O’Neill
206 Scots and Galwegians in the ‘peoples address’ of Scottish Royal Charters
Kenji Nishioka
233 A Kingdom Cleared of Castles: The Role of the Castle in the Campaigns of Robert Bruce
David Cornell
42 Pettyfoggers, Regulation, and Local Courts in Early Modern Scotland
John Finlay
258 From
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallContents2008-12-11text/htmlen-USContents2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®67992026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11Contributors to this volume
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255247
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Lynn Abrams 173
David Allan 168, 170
Robert Anderson 121
Robert Armstrong 341
Bernard Aspinwall 178
Michael Brown 336
James H. Burns 258
David Cornell 233
Cairns Craig 367
Valerie Cromwell 352
Stephen M. Cullen 306
Jane E. A. Dawson 339
H. W. Dickinson 351
Nicholas Evans 183
John Finlay 42
Nyree Finlay 333
Lisa L. Ford 356
James E. Fraser 1
W. Hamish Fraser 179
Jane Geddes 335
Kieran German 161
Judith Green 149
Christopher Harvie 350
Val Honeyman 278
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/338/image/coversmallContributors to this volume2008-12-11text/htmlen-USContributors to this volume2008-12-112008TWOProject MUSE®32832026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-12-11