Laura Stewart offers an intelligent and insightful account of a national religious culture within the broader context of the three kingdoms during their mid seventeenth-century crisis. The book is organised in two sections and six long chapters. ‘The Making of Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1641’ is illustrated in chapters on ‘People, politics and publics’, ‘Politics in the parishes’, which includes insightful discussion of the National Covenant (1638), and a shorter discussion of the revival of older Jacobean constitutional theories in ‘The covenanted commonwealth’. The second section, ‘Covenanted Scotland’, includes chapters on the covenanted state, authority and governance, and print, petitioning and public debate in the Engagement crisis of 1648.

Rethinking the Scottish revolution moves significantly beyond previous writing on the 1640s, and takes seriously the ‘British’ causes and consequences of the Scottish revolution. The result of this move is to complicate a narrative that historians have often taken for granted. David Stevenson proposed the descriptor of ‘revolution’ for the contexts of political and religious change that fed into the prayer book riots, and a generation of scholars has supported this claim, either qualifying, elaborating upon or radically expanding his argument. Stewart notes that Stevenson's proposal and its wide acceptance ensured that historical writing about the Scottish crisis sat easily within the contexts of the ‘new British history’, although, as Stewart notes, the preferences of the revisionist historians pursuing this approach embedded political narrative in historical writing in a way that has not encouraged scholars to ‘critique prevailing assumptions about Scottish society and investigate new ways of approaching Scotland's unique archive’ (p. 4). Stewart's remedy is to adopt a broader definition of politics and political agency, identifying contest where others have observed control, and showing how a broader public engaged with the transformation of the Scottish state through the articulation of new social and religious principles, providing this re-energised society with a stability that was unseen elsewhere in the three kingdoms, but that could not be sustained as the newly confident revolutionary government threw itself into international actions for which it was not prepared, the failure of which it could not survive. Rethinking the Scottish revolution demonstrates that, for example, it was the development of print culture in London that made possible the ideas and activities that, in 1638, upset the fragile ecclesiastical status quo and led directly to the bishops’ wars, inspiring the Irish rebellion, and drawing the archipelago into a protracted and devastating sequence of civil wars that undermined the achievements of the Scottish revolution while never being able to eradicate the national political and cultural structures that have continued to shape and make distinctive the Scottish experience of being ‘British’.

Rethinking the Scottish revolution pays careful attention to the divisions among the emerging covenanter party, following David George Mullan's warning, in his Scottish Puritanism (2000), of the dangers of ‘seeing things their way’, or at least as ‘they’ would wish to be seen. Stewart rightly observes that, in 1638, the articulation of a programme of religious politics within the form of a covenant packaged ideas of social change for contemporaries in a manner that challenged any aspiration of critical distance. This unifying gesture became the constitutional foundation of a confessional state that went far beyond the ‘superficiality’ of earlier programmes for religious change to effectively withstand the factionalism of religious novelty that continually challenged revolutionary government in England. Stewart pays attention to the agency of non-elite actors, and describes the processes by which the ideals of the new government were internalised in the process of self-discipline, recognising that in the case of a large section of the population the ideals of the new state was never fully internalised, even as they were continually projected.

This is a formidable intervention, complex and nuanced in its argument, and expansive in its scope, which will renew debate about politics and religion in mid seventeenth-century Scotland while making a considerable contribution to discussions of such contested issues as finance, war, print culture and gender – even if Stewart's identification of a distinctive Scottish covenanting ‘public’ is not universally adopted.