- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Study of Modern Scottish History
- Land and Sea: The Environment
- The Demographic Factor
- Mythical Scotland
- Religion and Society to <i>c</i>.1900
- The Literary Tradition
- The Clearances and the Transformation of the Scottish Countryside
- A Global Diaspora
- The Renaissance
- Reformed and Godly Scotland?
- The ‘Rise’ of the State?
- Reappraising the Early Modern Economy, 1500–1650
- Scotland restored and reshaped: Politics and Religion, <i>c</i>.1660–1712
- The Early Modern Family
- The Seventeenth-Century Irish Connection
- New Perspectives on Pre-union Scotland
- Migrant Destinations, 1500–1750
- Union Historiographies
- Scottish Jacobitism in its International Context
- The Rise (and fall?) of the Scottish Enlightenment
- The Barbarous North? Criminality in Early Modern Scotland
- Industrialization and the Scottish People
- Scotland and the Eighteenth-Century Empire
- The Challenge of Radicalism to 1832
- The Scottish Cities
- Identity within the Union State, 1800–1900
- Immigrants
- The Scottish Diaspora since 1815
- The Impact of the Victorian Empire
- The Great War
- The Interwar Crisis: The Failure of Extremism
- The Religious Factor
- Gender and Nationhood in Modern Scottish Historiography
- The Stateless Nation and the British State since 1918
- Challenging the Union
- A New Scotland? The Economy
- A New Scotland? Society and Culture
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Historically, Scotland's myths have been subject to the fickleness and changing whims of ideological fashion, and turn out to have had much less staying power than the nation, whose supposed enduring essence they are meant to represent. It is possible to discern at least four distinct ‘moments’ of national mythmaking in Scotland between the sixteenth century and the present. These comprise the refashioning in the sixteenth century by the humanist Hector Boece and the humanist reformer George Buchanan of the origin legend of the Scottish nation inherited from the late medieval era; the replacement of this spurious account of Celtic antiquity in the 1760s by an equally fabulous account derived from what was believed to be epic poetry composed by a blind bard by the name of Ossian in the third century AD; the emergence of another romantic myth of Scots highlandism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; and, finally, in the nineteenth century, the myth of a democratic, Whig-Liberal Presbyterian tradition.
Keywords: Scotland, myths, mythmaking, Hector Boece, George Buchanan, epic poetry, Ossian, highlandism, Presbyterian tradition
Colin Kidd, FRSE, FBA, Professor of Intellectual History and Political Thought, Queen's University Belfast
Dr James Coleman, University of Glasgow
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- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Study of Modern Scottish History
- Land and Sea: The Environment
- The Demographic Factor
- Mythical Scotland
- Religion and Society to <i>c</i>.1900
- The Literary Tradition
- The Clearances and the Transformation of the Scottish Countryside
- A Global Diaspora
- The Renaissance
- Reformed and Godly Scotland?
- The ‘Rise’ of the State?
- Reappraising the Early Modern Economy, 1500–1650
- Scotland restored and reshaped: Politics and Religion, <i>c</i>.1660–1712
- The Early Modern Family
- The Seventeenth-Century Irish Connection
- New Perspectives on Pre-union Scotland
- Migrant Destinations, 1500–1750
- Union Historiographies
- Scottish Jacobitism in its International Context
- The Rise (and fall?) of the Scottish Enlightenment
- The Barbarous North? Criminality in Early Modern Scotland
- Industrialization and the Scottish People
- Scotland and the Eighteenth-Century Empire
- The Challenge of Radicalism to 1832
- The Scottish Cities
- Identity within the Union State, 1800–1900
- Immigrants
- The Scottish Diaspora since 1815
- The Impact of the Victorian Empire
- The Great War
- The Interwar Crisis: The Failure of Extremism
- The Religious Factor
- Gender and Nationhood in Modern Scottish Historiography
- The Stateless Nation and the British State since 1918
- Challenging the Union
- A New Scotland? The Economy
- A New Scotland? Society and Culture
- Index