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.

The Social Life of Coffee

The Social Life of Coffee
Author: Brian Cowan
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300133502

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.

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.

Scotland's Parliament Site and the Canongate

Scotland's Parliament Site and the Canongate
Author: Holyrood Archaeology Project Team
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008
Genre: Canongate (Edinburgh, Scotland)
ISBN:

The site of the new Scottish Paliament in Edinburgh was the focus of archaeological work that illuminated medieval Canongate and unravelled the history of Queensberry House. A team of archaeologists, historians, architectural historians and scientists was brought together for the task, and here they present the discoveries that were made both on the ground and in the documentary sources, early maps and drawings. The fortunes of Canongate have fluctuated from wealth, as the fashionable place for Scotland's aristocratic families to live in the 16th to 18th centuries, to dire poverty in the 19th, but Queensberry House has survived remarkably intact for more than three centuries. The exploration of this area of the Old Town of Edinburgh spans nine hundred years of busy urban life from the 13th century when the burgh was created to the 21st century when the new Parliament was built.

A Great Grievance

A Great Grievance
Author: Laurence A.B. Whitley
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1621896447

In 1843 the Church of Scotland split apart. In the Disruption, as it was called, those who left to form the Free Church of Scotland claimed they did so because the law denied congregations the freedom to elect their own pastor. As they saw it, this fundamental Christian right had been usurped by lay patrons, who, by the Patronage Act of 1712, had been given the privilege of choosing and presenting parish ministers. But lay patronage was nothing new to the Church in Scotland, and to this day it remains an acceptable practice south of the border. What were the issues that made Scotland different? To date, little work has been done on the history of Scottish lay patronage and how antipathy to it developed. In A Great Grievance, Laurence Whitley traces the way attitudes ebbed and flowed from earliest times, and then in the main body of the book, looks at the place of Scottish lay patronage in the extraordinary and complex period in British history that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The book examines some of the myths and controversies that sprung up and draws some unexpected conclusions.