Academic literature on the topic 'The Royal Scots (Lothian regiment)'

The rocky peninsula of Gibraltar juts south from Spain at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Long famous as a landmark, it was ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and progressively developed as a naval and military base. Thomas James, a Royal Artillery officer stationed on Gibraltar from 1749 to 1755, was the first member of the British garrison to publish geological observations on the Rock, within a book of 1771 completed in New York. His military career culminated after active service against revolutionary Americans, finally in the rank of major-general, but with no further known contributions to geology. The Scotsman Ninian Imrie of Denmuir, an officer of the First Regiment of Foot (The Royal Scots), served on Gibraltar within the period 1784 to 1793, and was the first to publish an account specifically on its geology, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1798. A career soldier, he achieved the rank of lieutenant-colonel before retiring to Scotland, and to amateur geological studies influenced by active membership of Edinburgh's Wernerian Natural History Society. James Smith of Jordanhill, near Glasgow, served in Great Britain in the Renfrewshire Militia during the Napoleonic Wars but, benefiting from a family fortune, later spent much time as a yachtsman and scholar of wide interests and influence. His studies on Gibraltar, published by the Geological Society of London in 1846, were the first to attempt a tectonic interpretation of the Rock's geological history, and to record local evidence for Quaternary sea level change.

The last medieval queens: English queenship, 1445–1503. By J. L. Laynesmith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii+294. ISBN 0-19-924 737-4. £35.00.The marrying of Anne of Cleves: royal protocol in Tudor England. By Retha M. Warnicke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+343. ISBN 0-521-77037-8. £19.95.Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: a political career. By Pamela E. Ritchie. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 1-86232-184-1. £20.00.My heart is my own: the life of Mary Queen of Scots. By John Guy. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Pp. xii+574. ISBN 1-84115-752-X. £20.00.Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+300. ISBN 0-7190-5769-8. £49.99.Therefore if any man be in christ, let him be a new creature.Old things are passed away: behold, all things are become new.2 Cor. 5:17, Geneva BibleThe Reformation's claim to be, in Patrick Collinson's words, the ‘greatest geological fault line in European civilisation’ rests not on the fact that it proposed a new set of answers to old questions, but rather that it proposed old answers in a new world – the one that came into being with the advent of printing. This confluence transformed the ways in which the yearning for purification and renewal endemic to the religious impulse was enacted and institutionalized during the early modern period. Most radically, the Reformation challenged the socio-political hierarchies of degree, descent, and gender that had ordered medieval society. These hierarchies were most powerfully symbolized by the person of the king. In important ways they were perceived to be embodied in and dependent on him and, through him, on the women who came to be queens. To understand early modern queenship, we must bear this cultural context in mind. Too often, however, historians fail to do so, writing instead of kings and queens in terms more suited to modern political biography. This limits our ability to comprehend not only the phenomenon of kingship, but also – for as long as personal monarchy remained the dominant form of European government – political culture more generally. This review article provides an opportunity to address this historiographical deficiency. I therefore want to begin by sketching out the contours of early modern queenship, before turning my attention to the books under review.