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.

"A well-sourced, informative read on the different ecclesiological and political perspectives underlying the Scottish Revolution." - The North American Anglican

"A valuable contribution to the scholarship of religious and political ideas in early modern Scotland." - Studies in Puritanism and Piety

"Provides an in-depth, nuanced examination of a part of early modern European intellectual history and lays the groundwork for better understanding how, only a century later, the Scottish Enlightenment could bloom." - CHOICE

"It is a testament to the author that one is left wondering why no one has done this sort of analysis before. It takes a unique skill set to be able to offer an analysis of such a wide range of pan-European scholarship and to then understand how it related to the constitutional crises that gripped Britain and Ireland in this period." - Scottish Church History