Table of Figures; Abbreviations; A Note on the Text; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1: Edinburgh and Scotland in the mid-1690s; 2: The Politics of Blasphemy; 3: "So unnaturall a seasone": The Dreadful Year 1696; 4: The Making of a Blasphemer; 5: Trial and Execution; 6: The Aftermath: Public Opinion in Scotland and England; Conclusion; Bibliography of Works Cited; Index.
Michael F. Graham is Professor of History and sometime Director of the Humanities in the Western Tradition programme at the University of Akron, Ohio. His previous publications include 'The Uses of Reform: 'Godly Discipline' and Popular Behaviour in Scotland and Beyond, 1560-1610' (1996), which was awarded the Roland Bainton Prize by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. His research focuses on the religious, cultural and social history of early modern Britain.
'Michael F Graham uses the "microhistorical method ... to give us
the best account yet of Aikenhead's life and hanging. It is
painstaking research - all those fugitive legal documents and
trawling through ancient library indexes - but it adds up to a
rounded and enthralling if necessarily incomplete and speculative
picture'--Stuart Kelly "The Scotsman"
Aikenhead's execution is considered a milestone on Scotland's dark
road to the Enlightenment and Graham shows us with vividness and
some effective dramatic timing, the worst that can happen when
self-righteousness and political expediency join forces.--Dilys
Rose "Edinburgh Review"
Michael F. Graham tackles the infamous Aikenhead case with a
microhistorical approach. He examines Aikenhead's case in the
context of the social history of 1690s Edinburgh and explains how a
student became a scapegoat... Graham makes a convincing case that
social factors influenced the fate of Thomas Aikenhead.--Karen
Baston "Early Modern Intelligencer"
This is detailed and archivally informed historical writing -
exploiting parish, judicial, ecclesiastical and private papers
Graham delivers a textured sense of the tense atmosphere riven by a
bustling and intellectually robust university and the assumptions
of a civic society which assumed the rightness of divine punishment
for public sins... An excellent contribution to contextualising
both the possibilities and consequences of articulating dissident
ideas in an anxious confessional culture.--Justin Champion, Royal
Holloway, University of London "Reviews in History"
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