Studying James Fraser leads to some troubling reflections. This book has suggested aspects of his character that will be unpalatable to many twenty-first-century readers, in terms of his attitudes to race and ethnicity, sex and gender, for example. If we view Fraser's surviving written work as an expression of the social position he held, or wished to hold, the evidence can seem to confirm a male, clerical hegemony we might associate with the Restoration period.1 However, one of the notable features of the Highlands and Scotland that the book has sought to highlight is how the civil wars of 1638–60, the 1688–90 period, the beginnings of Jacobitism and the Treaty of Union of 1707 made rigidity and complacency extremely poor survival strategies, and placed Fraser towards the social, political or religious edge at several points in his life. If we consider his seventy-five years as a whole, the ‘curious cleric’ was a subversive as much as he was a conformist.2 In general, one hopes that his life-writing has been shown to be more idiosyncratic, and harder to pigeonhole, than any convenient identification of him using modern terms like ‘reactionary’ or ‘conservative’ might suggest. History involves us seeking to comprehend periods and situations with features that, at times, appear strikingly recognisable and, at other points, alien to the times and places in which we live today. Key to understanding this, as regards Fraser, has been to position him within the dynamic, distinct social and cultural context of the Highlands of his time. Fraser's part of Scotland was being deeply affected by metropoles further south in his lifetime, certainly, but not exclusively by them. It took influences from peoples to its east, north and west too. Due to this, its people were making striking, distinctive contributions to the world of their own, and, to some extent, continuing to determine their trajectory while within the Scottish state and Stuart multiple kingdom, a situation in which clanship remained dynamic and the Gaelic language vital. Fraser represents that situation, both when in the mainstream and, to a lesser extent, when on the margins.