The Press and the People

The Press and the People
Author: Adam Fox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 661
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192508814

The Press and the People is the first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland. It traces the production and distribution of ephemeral publications from the nation's first presses in the early sixteenth century through to the age of Burns in the late eighteenth. It explores the development of the Scottish book trade in general and the production of slight and popular texts in particular. Focusing on the means by which these works reached a wide audience, it illuminates the nature of their circulation in both urban and rural contexts. Specific chapters examine single-sheet imprints such as ballads and gallows speeches, newssheets and advertisements, as well as the little pamphlets that contained almanacs and devotional works, stories and songs. The book demonstrates just how much more of this literature was once printed than now survives and argues that Scotland had a much larger market for such material than has been appreciated. By illustrating the ways in which Scottish printers combined well-known titles from England with a distinctive repertoire of their own, The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular literature in early modern Scotland and its contribution to British culture more widely.

Scotland in Revolution, 1685-1690

Scotland in Revolution, 1685-1690
Author: Alasdair Raffe
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-08-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474471846

Explores the transformative reign of the Catholic King James VII and the revolution that brought about his fall.

Boswell's Edinburgh Journals

Boswell's Edinburgh Journals
Author: Hugh Milne
Publisher: Birlinn
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0857905864

James Boswell's relish for life, unflinching honesty and wide social contacts make him one of the raciest and most entertaining of all diarists.This is a one-volume edition of the journals he kept while making his living as an advocate in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Hugh Milne's introduction and notes remove the barriers that time has placed between us and Boswell. The result is a book in which an extraordinary personality lives before us upon the page. Boswell embodied in himself all the extremes and contradictions of his time and place. This was the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment, and among his friends he counted thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith, and entertained eminent visitors like Dr Johnson. Boswell was alive to every new social or political idea and was interested in all the drama of human life, whether high or low. All Boswell's public and private doings, and his inner debates about religion and the meaning of life, go unedited into his journal. His vivid description of a whole gallery of characters and situations makes its pages compulsively readable.

Famine in Scotland - the 'Ill Years' of the 1690s

Famine in Scotland - the 'Ill Years' of the 1690s
Author: Karen J. Cullen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 074864184X

This book examines the climatic and economic origins of the last national famine to occur in Scotland, the nature and extent of the crisis which ensued, and what the impact of the famine was upon the population in demographic, economic and social terms. Current published knowledge about the causes, extent, and impact of the famine in Scotland is limited and many conclusions have been speculative in the absence of extensive research. Despite the critical importance of this crisis, one of the four disasters of the 1690s, which are widely acknowledged to have contributed to the economic arguments in favour of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, the topic has been largely neglected and even underplayed by historians. This is the first full study of the famine, providing a unique scholarly examination of the causes, course, characteristics and consequences of the crisis. A comprehensive study of agricultural, climatic, economic, social and demographic issues, the book seeks to establish answers to the fundamental question concerning the event. How serious was it? Using detailed statistical and qualitative analysis, it discusses the regional factors that defined the famine, the impact on the population, and the interconnected causes of this traumatic event.

George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1681–1731

George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1681–1731
Author: Daniel Szechi
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2002-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788854268

This comprehensive analysis of the Jacobite mind challenges prevailing stereotypes about Jacobites and provides a detailed history of the Jacobite movement, whose influence on the development of Scotland and the British Isles in the eighteenth century was immense. The author provides an in-depth analysis of the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of one of the most active Jacobites of the early 18th century: George Lockhart of Carnwath. Lockhart was almost a stereotypical eighteenth-century Scottish coming man: a Commissioner for Midlothian in the Scottish Parliament; a member of the Commission charged with negotiating the treaty of Union; MP for Midlothian at Westminster; an improving landlord; an accomplished writer and pamphleteer. But most of all, he was a committed, passionate Jacobite and nationalist who rose to become one of the senior leaders of the Jacobite underground in Scotland in the period between the rising of 1715 and the more famous '45. By bringing out the distinctive features of Lockhart's perception of the world and his times, Daniel Szechi sheds light on the inner workings of the Jacobite mind and hence the Jacobite underground in Scotland during the traumatic years leading up to and following the Union of 1707.

Seventeenth Century Practical Mathematics

Seventeenth Century Practical Mathematics
Author: Paul Hughes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000457672

This exciting Greenvill Collins biography is about seventeenth century navigation, focusing for the first time on mathematics practised at sea. This monograph argues the Restoration kings’, Charles II and James II, promotion of cartography for both strategy and trade. It is aimed at the academic, cartographic and larger market of marine enthusiasts. Through shipwreck and Arctic marooning, and Dutch and Spanish charts, Collins evolved a Prime Meridian running through Charles’s capital. After John Ogilby’s successful Britannia, Charles set Collins surveying his kingdom’s coasts, and James set John Adair surveying in Scotland. They triangulated at sea. Subsequently, Collins persuaded James to sustain his dead brother’s ambition. This, the British coast’s first survey took six years. After James’s flight, and William III’s invasion, Collins lead the royal yacht squadron for six years more, garnering funds to publish Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot. The Admiralty and civic institutions subsidised what became his own pilot. Collins aided Royal Society members in their investigations, and his new guide remained vital to navigators through the century following. Charles’s cartographic promotion bloomed the most spectacularly in the atlases of Ogilby, Collins and John Flamsteed for roads, harbours, and stars.

Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain

Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain
Author: Robin Gwynn
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2015-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782842179

The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain is planned as one work to be published in three interlinking volumes (titles/publication dates detailed below). It examines the history of the French communities in Britain from the Civil War, which plunged them into turmoil, to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, after which there was no realistic possibility that the Huguenots would be readmitted to France. There is a particular focus on the decades of the 1680s and 1690s, at once the most complex, the most crucial, and the most challenging alike for the refugees themselves and for subsequent historians. The work opens with the Calvinist French-speaking communities in England caught up in the Civil War. They could not avoid it, with many of their members largely assimilated into English society by the 1640s. Generally they favoured the Parliamentarian side, but any victory was pyrrhic because the Interregnum supported the rights of Independent congregations which undermined their whole Calvinist structure. Weakened by in-fighting, in the 1660s the old-established French churches then had to reassert their right to exist in the face of a sometimes hostile restored monarchy and episcopacy, a newly licenced French church emphasizing its Anglicanism and its loyalty to the crown, and the challenges of the Plague and the Fire of London which burnt the largest French church in England to the ground. They were still staggering to find their feet when the first trickle and then the full flood of new Huguenot immigration overwhelmed them. As for the newly arriving Huguenot ministers, not prepared for the England to which they came, they found they had to resolve what was often an intense personal dilemma: should they stand fast for the worship they had led in France, or accept Anglican ways? and if they did accept Anglicanism, to what extent? It is demonstrated that many ministers took the Anglican route, although Volume II will show that the French communities as a whole, old and new alike, voted with their feet not to do so. A substantial appendix provides a biographical account of over 600 ministers in the orbit of the French churches across this period. Volume II: Settlement, Churches, and the Role of London 978-1-84519-619-6 (2017); Volume III: The Huguenots and the Defeat of Louis XIV's France 978-1-84519-620-2 (2020).

Scots and the Union

Scots and the Union
Author: Christopher A Whatley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2014-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0748680292

This book traces the background to the Treaty of Union of 1707, explains why it happened and assesses its impact on Scottish society, including the bitter struggle with the Jacobites for acceptance of the union in the two decades that followed its inaugur