With Hallowe’en nearly upon us, Dr Allan Kennedy gets into the spooky spirit by telling the story of the supposed witches’ coven discovered in Crook of Devon, Kinross-shire, in 1662. Follow Allan on Twitter at: @Allan_D_Kennedy Between 1563 and…
Dr Allan Kennedy tells the story of the little-known bandit Calum Og McGrigor, who terrorised the Stirlingshire area throughout the 1660s, and asks what his crimes can tell us about deviance and marginality in 17th-century Scotland. Follow Allan…
Continuing his exploration of the rich and fascinating papers of West Lothian laird Sir Walter Dundas (1562-1636), Dr Alan MacDonald grapples with an age-old problem: how many legs are there on a goose? Follow Alan on Twitter at @estaitis In 1616,…
Dr Allan Kennedy looks at the vogue for Scotland-based popular songs in Restoration England, asking what their subject-matter was, and what they can tell us about English attitudes towards Scotland in the later 17th century. Follow Allan on Twitter at: @Allan_D_Kennedy …
Dr Alan MacDonald delves into the rich and fascinating papers of Sir Walter Dundas (1562-1636), a West Lothian laird whose innovative land-management practices suggest that ‘Improvement’ may have begun in Scotland a good deal earlier than is often supposed.…
Samantha Hunter is a PhD student at the University of Dundee, researching governance and social control in seventeenth-century Scotland. Follow Samantha on Twitter at @sam_hunter95 The records of the early modern period provide wonderful, and often unexpected,…
Dr Allan Kennedy discusses the concept of uncleanliness in early modern Scotland, and explores the way this idea linked to issues of public order and criminal deviance. Follow Allan on Twitter at: @Allan_D_Kennedy Among the many consequences of the…
Lisa Baer-Tsarfati is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph, whose research uses natural language processing and word embeddings (vector space modelling) to examine how language was used to exert control in early modern Scotland. In this special…
In this guest post, Maurice Millar explores the life and work of the often-overlooked Dundee Colourist painter John Maclauchlan Milne. John Maclauchlan Milne (1885-1957) – JMM – was in the same places, at the same times, doing the…
In this guest post, Murdo Macdonald, Professor Emeritus of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee, tells us about his new book, Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). My book, Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins (Edinburgh…