Parliaments, Princes, and Presses: Voices of Tradition and Protest in Early Modern Scotland

Abstract

Early modern European society was, in an age before modern communications and transport, a traditionally more private world where the political public sphere was dominated by small elites, many of whom were not strongly connected to the lives of ordinary folk, other than those in their immediate locality. Centres of power and networks of vertical interaction, in Scotland and elsewhere, were often highly localised as mercantile and landed elites interacted with retainers and tenants.