Union, Revolution and Religion in 17th-Century Scotland.(Review)

By David Stevenson. (Collected Studies, 570.) Pp. xiv + 334. Aldershot: Variorum. 1997. [pounds]52.50. 0 86078 642 0

One of the most prolific and influential Scottish historians of the twentieth century has drawn together sixteen previously published papers in the familiar format of the Variorum Collected Studies series. In a preface to the collection David Stevenson remarks fairly on the pivotal role he has played in transforming the modern understanding of seventeenth-century Scotland in general and of the Scottish revolution in particular. In the late 1960s, rejecting the assumption that 'Scottish history was church history', he set out to uncover the secular forces at work in the politics and culture of seventeenth-century Scotland, mostly in the dozen books he proceeded to publish, but also in the essays he has now reissued. Scottish historians will already be familiar …