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This thesis examines sixteenth-century Scottish perspectives on Marie de Guise and Mary Stuart. Four histories are analyzed: John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, George Buchanan’s History of Scotland, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s Historie and Cronicles, and John Lesley’s History of Scotland. While each author offers a different perspective of the queens based on personal religious and political beliefs, the four texts address the same main themes: Catholicism, Frenchness, tyranny/agency, and femininity. These elements are addressed through similar persuasive tools such as character manipulation, disparagement of supporters, and comparison to earlier monarchs and regents. Most importantly, Marie de Guise is perceived as a behavioural predecessor to Mary Stuart in all four histories, thus creating a foreshadowing of Mary’s rule. This thesis offers heterogeneous perspectives on both queens which have lasted to the modern era, and which contribute to the understanding of queenship as it was perceived in sixteenth-century Scotland. SSHRC-CGS-Master's

This dissertation examines women’s lives and relationships in Canongate, a burgh (town) neighbouring but independent of Edinburgh, over the first sixty years of the seventeenth century. It explores women’s contributions to their families, local economy and community as captured in the rich social records of the Canongate kirk session (church court) records, burgh court records and individual wills and testaments. The dissertation focuses on the four interconnected areas of family, work, support and litigation, arguing that women played critical and complicated roles in these areas. Many women strove to provide for their families, honouring both close and extended relations. They engaged in a diverse spectrum of work both within and outside the household, actively contributing to their local economy. Women both gave and received charity in the kirk-sanctioned and -controlled poor relief system, but many others also participated in illicit networks of support at the margins of society. Women were also active quarrellers in the streets and the courts, using both arenas to police neighbours’ behaviours and defend their own. The study’s comparative approach of both records and relationships deepens and clarifies our understanding of women’s lives in an early modern town. It also fills an important historiographical gap, placing the women of Canongate in their wider Scottish and European contexts. The dissertation demonstrates the complexity of women’s lives and relationships, the boundaries of their agency, and the variety of their contributions to their families, economy and town. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

This dissertation examines the links between speech and witchcraft during Scotland’s witch-hunting period in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. As this thesis argues, verbal performances were a key feature in many definitions of witchcraft, from the curses and quarrels of maleficent witches, to the healing prayers of charmers, to the verbal pacts of diabolical witches. While witches in general were believed to possess a wide variety of powers, it was their utterances that most often brought them to the attention of the kirk and community, and which most often formed the majority of the evidence filed against them in their trials. Indeed, it was in the context of the court room that contested definitions of witchcraft found common ground in the words of witches. Consequently, speech should be seen as a unifying factor in popular, religious, and judicial definitions of witchcraft. This research draws on a wealth of printed and manuscript sources on Scottish witch-hunting, in particular, the process notes of the Justiciary Court and the kirk session and presbytery records. This material is supplemented by transcripts of additional trial material, sermons, demonological tracts and treatises, and other sources. The majority of the dissertation focuses on the legal evidence sought and submitted in the trials, demonstrating how local and central judges determined what constituted proof of witchcraft. While other historians have pointed out the connection between witches and words, this has generally been seen as a characteristic of popular folk belief rather than judicially-defined witchcraft: witches were accused of cursing, but convicted of having served the Devil. Alternately, the relationship has been explained as a consequence of the gendered stereotype of witchcraft, rather than an important feature in its own right. By focusing on speech as the commonality, however, we can better understand why women were most often accused of this crime, as well as revealing how witch-hunting was part of a larger concern and anxiety over speech in early modern Scotland.

By re-examining the circumstances surrounding the establishment and disestablishment of the Scots Navy, this thesis challenges existing scholarship which suggests that Scotland was neither an active participant in, or greatly impacted by, the early modern naval revolution. The Scots Navy did not disappear in the middle of the sixteenth century because Scotland no longer had need for a means of conducting maritime warfare, nor was a lack of fiscal capacity on the part of the Scottish state to blame, as has been suggested. In fact, the kingdom faced a constant series of maritime threats throughout the period, and these had compelled the Scots to accept the value of seapower and to embrace the technological innovations of the naval revolution. And as had occurred in other states impacted by the revolution, the Scottish fiscal system went through a structural transition that gave the Crown the capacity to acquire and maintain a permanent fleet. However, by mid-century the need for such a fleet had dissipated due to a shift in strategic focus which merged Crown and mercantile interests. This merger solved the principal-agent problem of military contracting – the dilemma that had led James IV to found the Navy in the first place – and this meant that Scottish maritime warfare could be conducted by privateers alone thereafter. An effective maritime legal regime, which had emerged as a result of Scotland’s participation in the naval revolution, ensured that these privateers did not engage in piracy, and instead conducted their operations in the interests of the kingdom as a whole. This thesis proves that Scotland was an active participant in, and was deeply impacted by, the naval revolution. Such a conclusion suggests not only that Scottish naval history is in need of revision, but also that certain aspects of the history of institutional development in Scotland may need to be reviewed. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)

This dissertation examines the formation of marriage in Scotland between the mid-fourteenth century and the late sixteenth century. In particular, it focuses on betrothals, marriage negotiations, ritual, and the place that these held in late medieval Scottish society. This study extends to the generation following the Reformation to examine the extent to which the Reformation influenced the marriage planning of wealthy Scots. It concludes that much of the social impact of the Reformation was not reflected in family life until at least a generation after reform. Scottish society and culture was influenced both by contemporary literature, which discussed the role of marriage formation, and by concurrent events involving high-profile marriages. These helped to define the context of marriage for society as a whole. This work relies heavily on the pre-nuptial contracts of lairds (the Scottish gentry) and nobles, which reflected certain aspects of their marriage patterns and strategies. The context and clauses of an extensive group of 272 Scottish marriage contracts from published and archival collections illuminate aspects of the formation of Scottish marriage, such as the land and money that changed hands, the extent to which brides and grooms were influenced by their kin, and the timelines for betrothals. This study is the only comprehensive work that has been done concerning the formation of marriage in medieval Scotland. The Campbells of Glenorchy and the Carnegie family both provide excellent case studies in which to examine the process of the choice of marriage partners, negotiation of marital arrangements, and the solemnizing of the unions. They also demonstrate the extent to which families were upwardly mobile through marriage. Although, until now, there has been a focus on the political potential of arranged marriage in Scotland, it is clear that there were social and financial advantages to kin groups that carried out careful marriage planning. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

This thesis is an investigation of elite normative masculinity in medieval Scotland. The attempts of medieval men to claim, enforce or deny personal obligations within homosocial relationships provide evidence of how aristocratic Scotsmen ought to have behaved. These obligations appear in documentary and literary sources and indicate the importance of the relationships associated with them. Charters and bonds of friendship, fealty, and indenture, and three fourteenth-century literary sources, the Liber Extravagans, Gesta Annalia, and The Bruce, provide evidence of normative expectations of men in medieval Scotland. These sources present a picture of an ideal man whose interactions with other men were governed by expectations of loyalty, honesty, bravery, wisdom, and valour. It is also apparent that while courtly chivalry was an influential normative source, its precepts were of secondary importance to the welfare and protection of one’s dependants. This study contributes to the growing body of work that emphasizes the importance of understanding manliness and male experiences as a gendered, constructed, and important force within society. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Ontario Graduate Scholarship

This thesis investigates the changing historical perceptions of the Scottish king Macbeth (r. 1040-1057) in relation to the development of Scotland's constitutional identity between 1000 and 2000 A.D. Macbeth's historiographical transformation from a fairly ordinary king in the eleventh century to a usurping tyrant during the later medieval and Enlightenment periods, and then to a peaceful prince and nationalist hero in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the result of successive generations of historians reinterpreting their country's history in order to justify the political ideologies of their contemporary communities. This metamorphosis not only demonstrates history writing's susceptibility to political forces, as well as how the myth of Macbeth has changed over time, but provides for us a comprehensive and linear, one-thousand-year example of the way in which Scotland's self-perception as a distinct nation has adapted according to the modernizing political process. Some of the writers included in this study are Marianus Scottus, John of Fordun, Andrew Wyntoun, Hector Boece, David Hume, Walter Scott, C. C. Stopes, Ruaraidh Erskine and Nick Aitchison.

This thesis investigates the relationship between the Scottish central government, meaning royal government and its representatives, and Scottish lords of the Anglo-Scottish border from 1525 to 1552. The necessities and organization of border administration created a situation in which there was a constant potential for instability, poor government on the borders, and disrupted relations between Scotland and England. Good administration depended on the crown's respect for border lords' independence and the fulfillment of border administrative duties by the border lords. This relationship and the strategic position enjoyed by the border lords on the frontier also created the potential for the border lords to participate in Scottish central politics to an extent much greater than any other Scottish peripheral region. This potential was most apparent during the power struggles between King James V and the Earl of Angus from 1525 to 1528, and the power struggle between the Earl of Arran and Cardinal Beaton starting in 1542. This study reveals that the character of border administration and the relationship between the crown and the borders was not determined solely by the crown. The independence of the border lords was continued due to the authority and strategic position of the borderers, even while the borderlands were being incorporated within the larger realm.

This thesis is an examination of the first attempts to introduce a system of justices of the peace into Scotland between the years 1587-1660. The thesis includes a discussion of the context and processes through which a series of ideologically divergent national governments sought to implement a system of local government and administration centred on these locally resident amateur magistrates. For these regimes, the office represented a tool with the potential to harness localized power to serve a diverse range of broader social, political, ideological and cultural aims. For those called upon to assume the role of justice of the peace in the localities, the office also represented a tool for tapping into broader sources of legitimacy and power to achieve their own goals. The narrative section of the thesis outlines the ideologies behind the creation of a system of Scottish JPs, and the results of the interactions between these two orientations of interest surrounding the office. Finally, it moves on to examine the outcomes that resulted from tension and cooperation between them. The thesis argues against traditional examinations of the office of justice of the peace in Scotland that saw it as the abject failure of an attempt to impose an English office on one part of a new multiple monarchy. The thesis also demonstrates the value of a return to an approach which integrates social history with intellectual, political and religious history. In this case, such an integrated approach was able to shed light on some new perspectives regarding the formation of a Scottish state, and the role of that state in the newly formed multiple monarchy of early modern Britain. This in turn allows the Scottish materials to better inform a study of the ongoing developments in the larger field of state formation in early modern Europe.

Complete book. A comprehensive view of the lives of women in Scotland from 1100 to 1750, based on a wide range of archival sources, including Court of Session records and Middle Scots poetry. Amongst the women featured are nuns, brewers, widows, witches, and wives of ministers of the kirk.

This thesis is an examination of the development of the way in which William Wallace and his career were assessed and described in British historiography from Wallace's lifetime to the publication of George Buchanan's 'Rerum Scoticarum Historia' in 1582. Beginning with the image of William Wallace constructed by his English contemporaries, the thesis traces the extent to which each subsequent image drew upon its predecessors, isolating four distinct stages or phases of development. The first of these, termed the Edwardian image, was constructed within the English chronicles contemporary with Wallace. The most significant influence shaping the second stage, termed the Brucean image, was exerted by Robert Bruce, whose self-interested propaganda included a consideration of Wallace and his career. In the fifteenth century, the Wallace image entered into a third stage, founded upon the Brucean image but greatly influenced by popular legend, imagination, and fifteenth-century issues. In its fourth stage, the image was altered to suit Renaissance attitudes within a Scotland that was decreasingly anti-English.

This dissertation investigates the prosecution of lethal and near-lethal violence in Scotland’s highest central criminal jurisdiction—the justiciary court—during the first half of the sixteenth century. It uses trial entries preserved in the court books to demonstrate that the 1530s and 1540s were important decades that saw dynamic changes in legal and administrative practices. Moreover, it shows how useful these records are as sources of information about the court’s role in social control and conflict resolution during this period. The study uses an original relational database to quantify and cross-reference data contained in the manuscript records of the justiciary records, often overlooked in favour of the more approachable edited versions. The results of this analysis reveal several important findings that question, confirm and enhance existing arguments about law, society and administration in premodern Scotland. The language used to describe violent offences reveals that whether an act of violence was interpreted as a legitimate or illegitimate use of force depended heavily on context, brutality and premeditation. This language entered the record in ever more formalised and structured ways that point to changes in the nature and apparent purpose of the justiciary court records, as well as to the bureaucratic acumen of the men who created them. However, rather than functioning as an impartial arbiter of the law, the justiciary court played several roles: a theatre in which plaintiffs, officials and the crown negotiated acceptable uses of force; a stage upon which the crown could be seen dispensing mercy and justice; and a source of revenue to fill royal coffers in constant need of replenishing throughout the sixteenth century. Underlying these negotiations and displays were contemporary attitudes about how the relationship between status, gender, honour and violence contributed to whether an offender was perceived as upholding or undermining the patriarchal hierarchy that ordered society in this period. Taken together, the arguments put forth in the dissertation demonstrate the extent to which this superior criminal jurisdiction served as a site at which plaintiffs, defendants and representatives of the crown interacted to define and redefine the line between violence and violation. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; St Andrews Society of Montréal; Scottish Studies Foundation; College of Arts (Guelph); Centre for Scottish Studies (Guelph)