Print culture and the press in early modern Scotland

A crucial– if underappreciated– scholarly formation within Scottish literary and cultural studies of the last quarter century has provided much valuable insight on the role of print in shaping the nation’s civic, material, and political identities in the early modern period. A pioneer in this recent effervescence of what we might now call the New Scottish Print History was Alastair J. Mann, whose study The Scottish Book Trade (2000) has become a seminal example of this emerging field. Mann saw what he argued was a major gap in early modern Scottish cultural and literary studies, as well as in the ‘best Scottish social and economic historiography since the Second World War’, which, he argued, had ‘failed to take account of the power of the press to breathe life into economic, cultural and political developments’ (2). Mann’s study sought to address this significant gap by focusing on ‘the unique qualities of the printed book, with its blend of commerce and technologyon the one hand, and intellect and ideology on the other’; taken together, these ‘provided a complex response of liberty and prohibition’ via Scotland’s key religious, state and social institutions (4). This review article assesses some common focal points, contexts and themes within recent major studies of early modern Scottish print culture that have developed since Mann’s study, including work by Stephen W. Brown, Adam Fox and some recent volumes of the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland (vol. 2), and the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press (vol. 1).