Protestantism, Revolution and Scottish Political Thought: The European Context, 1637-1651

During the Scottish Revolution (1637-1651), royalists and Covenanters appealed to Scottish law, custom and traditional views on kingship to debate the limits of King Charles I’s authority. But they also engaged with the political ideas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic intellectuals beyond the British Isles. This book explores the under-examined European context for Scottish political thought by analysing how royalists and Covenanters adapted Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic political ideas to their own debates about church and state. In doing so, it argues that Scots advanced languages of political legitimacy to help solve a crisis about the doctrines, ceremonies and polity of their national church. It therefore reinserts the importance of ecclesiology to the development of early modern political theory.

Karie Schultz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews where she is working on a project about early modern British and Irish student migration. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in 2020, followed by a Rome Postdoctoral Fellowship at the British School at Rome. She has research interests in the intellectual history of early modern Britain and Europe, focusing specifically on connections between political thought and theology. She has also published widely on Scottish intellectual history, university education and the Catholic mission.