Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland. (Reviews).

Roger A. Mason. Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland

East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998. ix + 277 pp. [pounds sterling]30. ISBN: 1-86232-01 1-X.

As the informative subtitle of this splendid collection of nine essays indicates, the book examines themes of political thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland. The first four essays are specifically on the former, whereas the next four focus on the latter. The last chapter on the origins of Anglo-Scottish imperialism is slightly more difficult to categorize.

In the blurb of the dustjacker, the publisher tells us that "many" of the essays are hitherto unpublished". This is, however, something of an exaggeration since only two of them, as the preface more candidly states, are printed here for the first time (and even part of the other of these two appeared simultaneously elsewhere), and two others have been considerably revised and expanded. None the less, the whole collection forms a coherent volume and the publisher is to be congratulated for bringing together all these essays in a readily accessible form.

If the subtitle tells what the book is about, the actual title captures its basic argument. The central question of the political thought in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland was the precise nature of the relationship between the king and the commonweal. But there is also another major theme running through most of the chapters: the usage of the past in political theories. Irrespective of the political slant of various particular arguments, they were all deeply embedded in Scottish history. As Mason puts it himself, "the significance of a sense of the past -- and the malleability of history -- are themes which are common to all the essays that follow" (6).

The opening chapter emphasizes the conservative and patriotic nature of fifteenth-century political thought (though Mason modifies this argument somewhat in the Introduction). The main attention of the first chapter is focussed on John Ireland's Meroure of Wyssdome whose political reflections on Scotland in the 1480s were to a large extent derived directly from Jean Gerson's analysis of the state of France around 1400. Despite such a conciliarist background, Ireland remained silent on the question of resistance. This step which Ireland refused to take was taken by John Mair whose seminal importance Mason stresses, calling him "probably the most intellectually gifted of all the authors considered in this book" (4). While the second chapter (incidentally the longest in the volume) makes no pretence of offering a comprehensive account of Mair's intellectual achievement, it provides a broad analysis of his Historia Maioris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae. Mair was a radical constitutionalist but Mason emphasi zes that such a posture should be seen in the larger context of Mair's humanist critique of the contemporary nobility.

Chapters three ("Chivalry and Citizenship: Aspects of National Identity in Renaissance Scotland") and four ("Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and the Political Culture of Early Renaissance Scotland") examine the impact of classical humanism on Scottish political thought. As Mason argues in chapter three, liberty or freedom was central to Scottish self-understanding in both the late Middle Ages and the early sixteenth century, but its ideological underpinning shifted from chivalric to classical. Nevertheless, classical republicanism was nor the only strand of Renaissance political thought which emerged in early sixteenth-century Scotland. Chapter four studies the royalist ideology of the period and the centrality of humanism in it.

The second group of essays (chapters five to eight) concentrates on the impact of the Reformation on Scottish political discourse. In chapters five and six Mason lays emphasis on the conservative nature of John Knox's thought. He did not espouse the theory of popular revolution but rather that of aristocratic rebellion. Knox's thought was based on a strong biblicism where the Scriptures were seen as a highly relevant book of binding legal precedents. Knox's History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland is the topic of chapter six. Although Knox of course accepted that everything in Scottish history was guided by the hand of God, he never employed sacred prophecy as a central element in his History. A Protestant (and classical republican) version of the history of the Scottish commonwealth was provided by George Buchanan in his Rerum Scoticarum historia in 1582.

Chapters seven and eight discuss in detail the complicated relationship between George Buchanan and his royal pupil James VI. Mason examines the Scottish context of James' theory of the divine rights of kings and sees it above all as a response to the king's Scottish clerical opponents in general and to his former tutor George Buchanan in particular. While James took it for granted that his royal authority rested on the law of God, he also expounded its historical background, refuting Buchanan's ancient constitutionalism.

Having reached the end of the sixteenth century by his examination of James VI's absolutism, Mason returns to the mid sixteenth century in the final chapter of the volume. It deals with the origins and development of the ideology of Anglo-British imperialism, which are located in the debates about the Scottish Reformation from the 1540s to the 1560s. But whereas during the "Edwardian Moment" of the late 1540s the language of empire was powerfully invoked, a decade later the same language was largely absent in the unionist rhetoric of the early Elizabethan years.

A usual problem with collections such as this is that, whilst experts are familiar with the essays and do not greatly profit from them being collected together, for students the essays often appear somewhat too detailed and specific. Mason's collection is a refreshing exception to this rule. While experts are no doubt familiar with the essays, collected together they offer a surprisingly comprehensive account of sixteenth-century Scottish political thought. The collection is thus invaluable for students, and even for specialists its worth is greater than the sum of its parts. It amply demonstrates the importance of the Scottish contribution to early modern British and even European intellectual history.