Blessed as they are with the benefit of hindsight, historians may legitimately look back on the decade of the 1560s as one of the great watershed moments in Scottish history. These years witnessed a series of interrelated crises – confessional, constitutional and diplomatic – the roots of which certainly lay deep in the past, but which came to a head in the years associated with the personal rule of Mary Queen of Scots. In many respects, the contents of this volume are concerned with the ways in which this ‘multiple crisis’ resolved itself over the ensuing century and with how the political and clerical elites came to terms with the dramatic changes it wrought. The dates 1560 to 1650 are intended to provide only a rough indication of the book's chronological scope. If one wanted to be precise one might well begin with the outbreak of the Congregation's rebellion in May 1559 and end with the execution of Charles I in January 1649. But the history of political thought and culture is hardly amenable to such exact dating. Inevitably, some of the chapters that follow look back to the period before 1560 and some look forward to the period after 1650 – and some do both. Maurice Lee, Jr, for example, in criticizing the idea of a mid-seventeenth-century ‘general crisis’, sets Scotland in a broad European context which stretches from the break-up of medieval Christendom to the formation of modern nation-states. Significantly enough, however, he highlights in the process the immense importance of the 1560s as well as the 1640s in the historical development of early modern Scotland (chapter 2). Periodization can, as he suggests, create as many problems as it solves for historians.