THE SILVER Fox, the Boss, Dr M, he of the full moustache and sardonic eyebrows – all these epithets have been used to describe Roger Mason by his colleagues and students. However, he is best-known to the academic community as Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, where he taught for almost four decades between 1979 and 2018; as the founding director of their Institute for Scottish Historical Research; and as a leading scholar of Scotland's intellectual and cultural engagement with the Renaissance and Reformation. Roger's research in the field of pre-modern Scottish History has been ground-breaking and iconoclastic. He re-cast late-medieval Stewart kingship within the framework of Renaissance monarchy and Christian humanism; pioneered the application of intellectual- and literary-historical approaches to early modern Scottish studies; and has produced novel and highly influential analyses of a wide canon of key texts, from Mair's History of Greater Britain to the writings of John Knox and George Buchanan. This volume, produced to mark Roger's retirement, celebrates his ‘rethinking’ of the Scottish Renaissance and Reformation by applying the core elements of his historical approach to a broader temporal period between the fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and to a range of unstudied or little-known texts. It explores new aspects of Scotland's cultural transition from medieval to Renaissance, the role of historical memory in defining and redefining Scottish identity, the interface between literature, politics and religion in a period of confessional strife and, above all, the importance of ideas in shaping the political and religious outlook of pre-modern Scots. This introductory essay serves both as a personal appreciation of Roger – not just as a research leader but as a colleague, mentor, and teacher – and outlines how the chapters in the volume both interact with and respond to Roger's extensive body of work.

Roger A. Mason: Historian, Colleague, Mentor

ROGER attended school at Robert Gordon's College, Drumtochty Castle, and Rannoch, and like most Scottish children of the mid-twentieth century was exposed to virtually no Scottish history while growing up. This trend continued when Roger went to Edinburgh University in 1972 to study Modern History and Politics, but increasingly he became drawn to history and particularly to the period of the Renaissance and Reformation as his course went on.