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The Scottish State and the Experience of Government, c. 1560-1707Essays in Honour of Julian Goodare

Edited by Martha McGill and Alasdair Raffe

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Published 31 January 2027

About this book

Offers an up-to-date assessment of Scottish state development
  • Case studies by leading scholars about the development of Scottish government from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century
  • Gives a new focus to debates about the developments of the Scottish state in the early modern period
  • Examines how governmental institutions affected the lives of a range of Scots
  • Presents new research on the local dynamics of state power, including in the Scottish witch-hunts
This volume examines the development of Scotland’s institutions of government in the early modern period, and considers how local and central authorities affected the lives of the Scottish people. In the book’s first part, contributors provide up-to-date studies of initiatives to reform, define and reimagine the Scottish state. The essays discuss changes in the privy council, parliament and administration, and assess political and constitutional ideas. The book’s second part explores how Scots experienced government. Contributors consider the material culture of state power and the actions of local courts and officials. Essays reconstruct the perspectives of criminals and religious dissenters, as well as participants in debt litigation and slander suits. Several chapters attend to the role of governing bodies in the Scottish witch-hunts. The essays respond to major themes in the work of Julian Goodare, who retired as Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh in 2021.

Reviews

What is the early modern state? What does it do, why, how, and to whom? The present essays, reflecting the scholarly work of Julian Goodare, illuminate many aspects of the state, from notables directing ‘high politics’ to those such as debtors, criminals and witches at the receiving end.
Julian Goodare has done more than anyone to redefine and anatomize power in early modern Scotland. Who benefited, profited or suffered from the consolidation, recasting and paradoxical diffusion of the state between c. 1550 and 1707? The answers given here by 14 scholars are wide ranging, complex, sometimes contradictory but deeply significant.
The best festschrifts combine essays that celebrate the range of interests of the individual being honoured with new research that extends those interests into new and unexplored directions. This collection is a case in point. It demonstrates the vitality of the history of ‘the state’ and ‘government’ in Scotland over such a dynamic period. This is a book for all libraries to hold and for all students of history to read.
Table of contents

Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Contributors

Introduction: The State, Society and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: Current Debates and the Influence of Julian Goodare
Martha McGill (University of Warwick) and Alasdair Raffe (University of Edinburgh)

Part 1: The Scottish State
1. Legitimising Authority: Rival ‘States’ and the Marian Civil Wars
Amy Blakeway (University of St Andrews)

2. ‘He is not factious but simple and well disposed to justice’: John Graham, Third Earl of Montrose and the Stewart Revolution in Government
Alan R. MacDonald (University of Dundee)

3. The Covenanters and the (Re-)imagining of the Scottish Constitution
Laura A.M. Stewart (University of York)

4. A Second Restoration: Remaking the Scottish State, 1678-1685
Alasdair Raffe (University of Edinburgh)

5. The Country Party and the Scottish Parliament, 1698-1704
Ben Rogers (University of Edinburgh)

6. The Highland “Other” and Scottish State Formation in the Seventeenth Century
Allan Kennedy (University of Dundee)

Part 2: The Experience of Government

7. Governmental Change and the Experience of Debtors in the Early Modern Scottish Courts
Cathryn Spence (University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada)

8. Controlling Subjects: Shame, the State, and the Ritual of Punishment in Early Modern Scotland
Harriet Cornell (University of Edinburgh)

9. Powerful Objects: Coercion, Restraint, Torture and Punishment in the Scottish National Collections
Anna Groundwater (National Museums Scotland)

10. The Great Tranent Witch-Hunt: Manufacturing Imaginary Enemies of the Scottish State
Louise Yeoman (BBC Scotland)

11. ‘A zealous prosecutor of witches’: Ephraim Melville and the Witch-Hunt at Queensferry, 1643-1644
Ciaran Jones (independent)

12. Enemies of God?: Slander, Gender and Witchcraft in the Scottish Parish
Michelle D. Brock (Washington and Lee University, Virginia, USA)

13. The Afterlives of Thomas and Jean Weir
Michael F. Graham (University of Akron, Ohio, USA)

Conclusion: State Power Revisited
Julian Goodare (University of Edinburgh)

Bibliography of Julian Goodare
Index

About the contributors

Martha McGill

Martha McGill is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland (2018) and The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland (2020), co-edited with Julian Goodare. She has also published various articles and chapters on early modern supernatural beliefs.

Alasdair Raffe

Alasdair Raffe is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on religion, politics and ideas in early modern Scotland, in particular the emergence of religious, intellectual and political pluralism in the 17th and 18th centuries. He is the author of The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660-1714 (Boydell, 2012) and Scotland in Revolution, 1685-1690 (EUP, 2018).