Search results for ""Author David Ditchburn""

Can anything new be said about the Declaration of Arbroath? This volume says there can.In 1977 Grant Simpson published a seminal article in the Scottish Historical Review: which asked if 'anything conceivably new can be said about a document so well known in Scotland as the Declaration of Arbroath?' The contributors to this volume demonstrate that there can. The text of the Declaration, written in 1320, followed closely an Irish prototype and was structured in the fashion that was expected at the papal court, where the letter was sent. It drew heavily on political ideologies and legal concepts with which English and continental intellectuals were familiar. And it was brought to papal attention through diplomatic means and practices which were commonly understood across Europe. Although the Declaration disappeared from political discourse in the centuries which immediately followed its dispatch, its rediscovery from the later seventeenth century is traced in hitherto unprecedented depth. Its relevance was not just to Scotland. The question of whether it influenced the American Declaration of Independence has oft been mooted but is here closely investigated. Today the Declaration remains a controversial document, inspirational to many, misappropriated by others, and even feared by some.Sharper focus on context; new textual analysis; unsurpassed investigation of the afterlife of the declaration in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Essays reconsidering key topics in the history of late medieval Scotland and northern England. The volume celebrates the career of the influential historian of late medieval Scotland and northern England, Dr Alexander (Sandy) Grant. Its contributors engage with the profound shift in thinking about this society in the light of his scholarship, and the development of the "New Orthodoxy", both attending to the legacy of this discourse, and offering new research with which to challenge or amend our understanding of late medieval Scotland and northern England. Dr Grant's famously wide and diverse historical interests are here reflected through three main foci: kingship, lordship and identity. The volume includes significant reassessments of the reputations of two kings, Alexander I of Scotland and Henry V of England; an examination of Richard III's relationship to the lordship of Pontefract; and a study of the development of royal pardon in late medieval Scotland. Further chapters consider the social influence and legal and tenurial rights vested in aristocratic lineages, regional gentry communities, and the leaders of burghal corporations. Finally, the relationship between saints cults, piety and regnal and regional identity in medieval Scotland is scrutinised in chapters on St Margaret and St Ninian.

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