Jenny Wormald has significantly enhanced our understanding of early modern Scotland in three distinct areas. The first concerns the tone and colour of Renaissance Scotland, which Jenny painted in rich and vibrant colours, altering forever how we see that period. Secondly she reconfigured how we think and write about the nobility, their exercise of power, their relations with the Stewart monarchy, their feuds and culture. Thirdly, she forced historians of England to recognise that James VI and I was a Scot and that he cannot fully be understood unless that fact, alongside his experience of ruling Scotland, is taken into account. The intellectual impact of all three lines of argument, unleashed in a string of books, essays and articles, especially in the 1980s, was transformative and agenda-setting. So what has Jenny Wormald's revision of early modern Scotland done for our understanding of it?

‘Academic life in the 1960s and 1970s was very different from how it is in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Whether it was better or worse is open to debate, and those who aggrandise the era as a golden age of small group teaching, unregulated research and apparent collegiality should reflect on the social privilege of the student body, the low status attached to research, and the blatant prejudice and lack of transparency that characterised university life. In particular, it was extremely difficult for a woman to make inroads into what was a very male club. Thus, while Jenny began teaching as a lecturer at the University of Glasgow in 1966, her first publication did not appear until 1972, two years before completing her PhD on bonds of manrent in late medieval and early modern Scotland. Like an unstoppable charge by mailed knights crashing into the undisciplined ranks of foot levies, that first publication, ‘Taming the magnates?’, drove a wedge deep into the prevailing view of Scotland's unruly, backward nobility. The 1970s saw two other important publications that laid out the Wormald agenda. An essay on Scottish politics in the reign of James VI announced that Jenny was a late medievalist who had something to say about early modern Scotland, a bold move that few Scottish medievalists have followed.