George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, edited by Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason

Abstract

George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, edited by Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing, 2012. xvi, 315 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). Edited collections of essays, particularly those emerging out of earlier conferences, do not always make the most coherent finished products. This is most definitely not the case with this fine collection on George Buchanan (1506-82). Buchanan stood Scotland's most distinguished humanist, and was widely celebrated throughout Europe a Latin poet, playwright, historian, and political theorist. Thanks to this celebrity, however, and his infamy the scourge of Mary Queen of Scots and an architect of radical rebellion, Buchanan has remained famous, while also being surprisingly ill-understood and neglected. Outside of specialist scholarship on Renaissance and Reformation Scotland, he is often remembered in caricatured, two-dimensional terms, and effectively reduced to a stock hero or villain of Scottish history and lore. This collection of essays helps remedy this, and its success and coherence owes much to the theoretical work done by Erskine and Mason in their short but important introduction. Positioning this volume in the emerging field of the study of historical reputations, the editors have produced the first survey of Buchanan's through the centuries, well his contested, often shadowy (pp. 79, 288), and constantly mutating reputation (p. 306) a political thinker and cultural icon. While many of the contributors to this volume variously explore the influence of Buchanan's ideas and writings, this is generally done with caution, consciously reflecting the challenges inherent in the elusive methodological task of demonstrating how, or to what extent one thinker influences another. Instead, Erskine and Mason shrewdly emphasize the importance of usage: that is, the way Buchanan's ideas and have been used (and abused) by successive generations. Thus, this book is concerned less with Buchanan's influence, and much more with his legacy, another alternate term discussed by the editors; it is as much a celebration of Buchanan's readers and their responses to his texts it is of the man and his writings (p. 10). The result is a collection that is both stimulating and, the subtitle promises, wide-ranging in its scope. While Buchanan is obviously a central focus, it should be noted that he is also the lens through which we view the book's other main subject: exchange, interaction, and cosmopolitan engagement in early modern Europe. For instance, in his essay on Buchanan's chorography, or geographical descriptions of Scotland and the Scots, Roger Mason explores not only the impact Buchanan had on the way Scotland's distinct geographical and historical identity was understood at home. He also looks at how Buchanan's enduring scholarly legacy shaped the way Scotland was defined and understood in Europe. Mason's is the opening essay and it helps set the tone for much of the volume. Indeed, one of the book's main themes is the translation of texts and contexts, and the contributions of Astrid Stilma, Robert von Friedburg, and Allan Macinnes all shed valuable light on how the Buchanan-inspired concept of political resistance was exported and adapted linguistically and circumstantially across continental Europe. …