As her subtitle indicates, Karie Schultz seeks to locate the seventeenth-century Scottish Revolution within the broader structures of European intellectual history. This “comprehensive approach,” she hopes, will reveal the richness of Scottish political thought and its visibly European character (8).

Schultz opens with an analysis of the royalist reaction against the Covenanting movement. Hostility to the National Covenant proved far more widespread than commonly portrayed, extending well beyond the familiar Aberdeen Doctors in the conservative northeast. Two elements were key to royalist thought. For royalists, there existed an extensive range of elements within church government and structure not prescribed by scripture, and this “adiaphoric” or indifferent dimension fell to the discretion of the monarch. Further and more interestingly, Schultz maintains that royalists looked to an authoritarian figure to direct the church because of man's inherent depravity since the Fall from Eden. This highly religious conception found itself nevertheless articulated and bolstered through Jean Bodin's (1530–1596) conception of sovereignty. Bodinian sovereignty became sacralized through its integration into the divine right of kings.

The Covenanters found both biblical directive and Scots law requiring a Presbyterian church order. That order, Schultz recognizes, did not imply theocracy. Quite the reverse, the Covenanters were much exercised to extract the church out of government, notably the episcopal order in parliament. The two jurisdictions required autonomy. At the same time, the debate over ecclesiology led to parliamentary sovereignty that would ratify (though never create) the Scottish Presbyterian Church. Again, an ostensibly narrow theological debate carried with it great implications for political institutions. One of the key figures for this line of thought, she claims, was the German Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), whose thinking underwrote the Scots’ federalist approach to government. For the Covenanters, Schultz observes, the Fall had limited human knowledge about God, his workings, and his grace.

Drawing on the work of Eric Nelson, Schultz briefly discusses the Judaic element in the Scottish Revolution. She notes Calvin's emphasis on the Old Testament and subsequently its growing autonomy as a text, rather than simply a predictive prelude to the gospels and Christ, as the medieval world had reflexively maintained. Thereby, the ancient Jewish kingdoms might offer a political model. Yet her real interest lies in finding Catholic and scholastic lines of thought underlying Scottish political culture. Following on such historians of early modern England as Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Anthony Milton, and Paulina Kewes, Catholicism looms large for Schultz. Specifically, Schultz looks to late scholastic thought at the University of Salamanca. Turning to Aristotle rather than Augustine, the Salamanca theologians argued that all government was “natural” and that therefore claims about false religion offered no basis for taking up arms. They thereby sought to undercut Protestant revolution, though their thought also carried the unintended consequence of complicating justification for the new and enormous Iberian empires. For the Scots, Schultz argues, the Salamanca theologians provided an expanded vision of human capability in earthly affairs. Schultz proceeds to present a generous assessment of this thinking, at moments making it sound like Renaissance civic humanism, rather than enjoining natural hierarchy (78 and passim). Yet there did exist an outlier in Spain, quite different from the professors at Salamanca: Fernando Váquez de Menchaca (1512–1569) would in fact endow this line of thought with a civic humanist dimension. And Váquez's “unique paradigm” would indeed be picked up by the Scots (125). If all the Spanish scholastics would appear in Scottish writing, Váquez proved notably relevant.

Protestant thought generally had adopted scholastic categories during the earlier seventeenth century as the confessional struggle deepened. The results could prove largely conservative and limiting. It is unfortunate that Schultz chooses to ignore Scotland's indigenous humanist tradition. George Buchanan’s De jure regni apud Scotos, dialogus (1567) and David Hume of Godscroft's De unione insulae Britannicae (1605) envisioned remarkable levels of public participation in politics. Yet Buchanan only surfaces as a contract theory monarchomach, while Hume does not surface at all. Their aristocratic histories appealed to the Covenanters, not their Aristotle-based expansion of civic action. In some ways, the revolution managed to contain Scotland's earlier radicalism.

Schultz's study is quite traditional in that it focuses almost exclusively on formal texts, only occasionally noting less formal statements and behavior. Astonishingly, she overlooks the Lord Advocate, Thomas Craig of Craighall (1573–1643), a key figure for Covenanter success, and yet one who agonized about the relation between the two jurisdictions—a central theme for Schultz. The severe textual focus may also have caused Schultz to overlook the shared identity among Scottish, Dutch, and English Presbyterians, despite the language barrier, that the Netherlands scholar Helmer Helmers has proposed.

Schultz describes how the 1647 Engagement ruptured the two jurisdictions and shattered the Covenanting movement. Yet the political thought of the radical self-purged government that subsequently emerged never undergoes analysis. She notes uncomfortably and without further comment Samuel Rutherford's “increasingly apocalyptic mindset” (153).

This in turn raises a fundamental flaw with the volume. Ancient Israel did not simply offer a political model, but also a promise. From the later fifteenth century, large numbers of people in Europe and beyond came to believe that they lived in the “latter days” of the world and the culmination of human history. This eschatological vision created a developmental prospect and validated action in this world; it proved secularizing in that it inherently operated in the saeculum. Such a vision might or might not sit uncomfortably with the atemporal, universal categories of scholastic reasoning. Apocalyptic thought proved integral to the Reformation and would fire Protestant expectations throughout the British Isles. No less did it inform debate and political fractures throughout the revolutionary period.

Schultz offers us a number of suggestive insights. Yet the volume emerges a good deal less “comprehensive” than its author suggests.