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73807 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1153 of 3691

  • 4 - Reading, Singing, Becoming: The Mädchenlieder of Paul Heyse and Johannes Brahms

  • Edited by Anja Bunzel, Natasha Loges
  • Book:
    Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019, pp 65-76

  • Summary

    The acts of reading and singing were indissolubly wedded in salon culture. The authors whose works were read silently when alone, or declaimed aloud for guests, were often the same whose lyrics were sung at drawing-room pianos. What expressive possibilities might have been created by this synergy between the printed and the sung word? How did these interlinked cultural objects encode – or possibly subvert – wider aesthetic, social and moral values, particularly for women? This chapter considers these questions through the works of the once enormously popular author Paul Heyse (1830–1914), whose writings at once fulfilled and challenged expectations during the second half of the nineteenth century. Among Heyse’s fans was his contemporary, the composer Johannes Brahms, who frequently set Heyse’s poems to music aimed at female performers in private settings. Brahms’s late Heyse setting ‘Mädchenlied’ Op. 95 no. 6 (1883–84) in particular seems to offer women a chance, through individual interpretative choices, to present an unfamiliar, daring persona, transforming the salon into what has been termed a ‘place of emancipation’.

    Heyse and Brahms became friends in 1873, by which point the writer had enjoyed considerable popular success for around twenty years. Heyse was a man of tremendous personal attraction. Heyse’s and Brahms’s mutual friend Max Kalbeck quoted the singer Georg Henschel’s recollection of Brahms thus: ‘Heyse was … one of the most charming of men … He was handsome, and that too, this exceedingly delightful talent! I hardly know any man who lit up the room he entered, like he did.’ A keen music-lover, Heyse regularly attended concerts in Munich at which another mutual friend, the conductor Hermann Levi, performed Brahms’s works, and they would all socialise together afterwards. Like Brahms, Heyse was an extremely successful professional creative artist. His oeuvre embraced a staggering 170-plus novellas, numerous dramas, eight full-length novels and several volumes of translations. His work was available in English from as early as 1867. Brahms was one of many readers who adored Heyse’s work; he declared that ‘a new novella by Heyse always means a day of celebration for me. I don’t read something like that just once; it lies by me for weeks and I read it constantly.’ The critic Eduard Hanslick, a close friend of Brahms, wrote to Heyse: ‘I cannot imagine the time in which your novels will no longer be read.’

  • 1 - An Intellectual and Aesthetic Formation: From Student Composer to Music Critic

  • Laura Watson, Maynooth University, Ireland
  • Book:
    Paul Dukas
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019, pp 17-54

  • Summary

    The true artist must educate himself and be his own teacher.

    Dukas’s formal training spanned piano, harmony and composition studies at the Paris Conservatoire from 1880 to 1889. During that period, he produced a few pieces which remain unpublished but have received a handful of performances and recordings since the 1990s. The first part of this chapter surveys the juvenilia, scoping out the relationships between these scores and the composer’s mature output; I comment on the Polyeucte overture too as a transitional work bridging these periods. The second part of the chapter is both a chronological and thematic continuation: I explore the young musician’s ‘unofficial’, self-directed schooling that began when he became resident critic for La Revue hebdomadaire in 1892. It was the ideal situation for one who felt short-changed by the educational establishment. An inclination to rebel against the Conservatoire was not merely youthful posturing. Dukas continued to voice reservations about its policies in his analysis of 1890s Paris as a challenging environment for emerging composers.

    As a veteran of the school’s annual Prix de Rome ritual, he bore the scars of the institution’s ethos and practices. The Conservatoire’s traditionalism was reinforced by the two major state opera companies (the Paris Opéra and Opéra-Comique), creating a situation which he believed conspired against the progress of opera in his country. In discussing this and other matters, Dukas explicitly constructed himself as a ‘French’ musician. While his Revue hebdomadaire articles were naturally driven by circumstances in the capital city, they were equally motivated by their author’s desire to forge (in his parallel professional life) a personal compositional style. To this end, he rarely wrote straightforward reviews. Instead, he evaluated performances and new works in historical and modern contexts (especially those local to Paris), measuring what he heard against stylistic norms and ideals, striving to pinpoint a spark of originality or statement of substance that justified the music’s contemporary relevance. These were the same standards he applied to his own work. Certain recurring themes in the early writings, notably Wagner and the post-1870 French symphonic tradition, signal how his evolving artistic identity was outgrowing his Conservatoire training. Assimilating the lessons of his youth and the surrounding professional scene, Dukas began philosophising about music. This laid the foundations for his independent creative practice.

  • 13 - “You Say You Want a Revolution”: East German Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas

  • Edited by Christina Gerhardt, Marco Abel
  • Book:
    Celluloid Revolt
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019, pp 218-236

  • Summary

    “The GDR [German Democratic Republic] was always in the 1970s,” the East German theater-director-turned-filmmaker Leander Haußmann stated, challenging the prevailing post-1990 historiography, which had dwarfed the East German experiment into “a footnote,” or aberration, of history.Explaining his collapsed country’s politics and culture in terms of preeminent Western movements, Haußmann argued that, indeed, they corresponded with many of the paradigm-changing trends in Western discourses with the focal date of 1968.

    I would like to test Haußmann’s assertion by probing East German cinema, whose economics and communicative practice, more than that of any other mass medium, entails the larger socio-political sphere. While scholarly approaches subsume East German cinema under its monopolistic studio system or tacitly treat it as an auteurist art, I argue that it is in fact both, namely a hybrid in which auteurs and the studio, and a third entity, the state, find a common denominator in the revolutionary stance and educational impetus of Third Cinema.

    You Say You Want a Revolution: East Germany in Its Own Write2

    East Germany’s core project was a revolution. From 1946 onwards, the GDR translated its postwar anti-capitalist bias into socio-economic structures that anticipated—and institutionalized—the greater equality and the rigorously understood democratization defining the goals of the global 1968 movements.But whereas this impetus opposed the established order in the West, it was literally the raison d’état in the East. According to its ideology, the GDR was a special purpose vehicle for a complete economic, social, and cultural overhaul aimed at equalizing access to power and emancipating the political subject.As an intermediate stage to a truly classless society, it had to change toward that aspiration in order to fulfill its promise.

    The term for this intermediary, “socialism,” was confusing. On the one hand, it referenced the theoretical construct; on the other hand, it designated the status quo as “real existierender Sozialismus” (really existing socialism). While many, if not most, East Germans could subscribe to the theory, really existing socialism—a highly politicized construct rendering the supposedly real—raised questions regarding the ruling party’s strategy and the project’s legitimacy, turning the term into a highly contested topography. Both need to be differentiated from yet a third, that is, the socialism—or the socialisms—Easterners actually experienced.

  • Vincent van Gogh, the Tre Corone, and the Studio of the South

  • Edited by Karl Fugelso
  • Book:
    Studies in Medievalism XXVIII
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019, pp 177-206

  • Summary

    The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) described his painting Portrait of Eugène Boch (Fig. 1) as the expression of his ideal Artist/Poet: “this young man with the Dante-like face” (September 3, 1888, Letter 673).Recent scholarship confirms the place of the Dante-inspired Portrait of Boch within Vincent’s plans for the Studio of the South: when it was clear to Vincent that his plans would not come to fruition, when his dreams for founding this utopian artist community had died, the Portrait of Boch no longer had a place in his bedroom.The Dante-like Artist/Poet represented by the Portrait of Boch was to be joined, in Vincent’s utopian community, by the modern-day equivalents of Dante’s compatriots Petrarch and Boccaccio, hence completing the triumvirate commonly known then, as now, as the Tre Corone.But in October 1888, when he lived in that bedroom and first painted it (Fig. 2), the Portrait of Boch in place above Vincent’s bed, the Artist/Poet was central to his plans for the Studio of the South and a significant element of the larger décoration he planned for the Yellow House as its home.When taken in the context of his references to Petrarch and Boccaccio, which start appearing in his letters in relation to his Studio of the South in September 1888, the Artist/Poet modeled on Dante – as symbol of those rare persons worthy of authority and emulation – becomes the Auctoritas who is ever-present inspiration and master and, what Van Gogh did not anticipate, also a subject of unresolved contention.

    Thus, what Vincent did not seem to realize, and, sadly, what occurred in Arles upon the arrival of Gauguin, is that, contrary to the mythic Tre Corone of the nineteenth century, the actual relationship among the Italian poets was anything but the harmonious and mutually supportive collaboration Vincent intended for his Studio of the South. Unwittingly, in those fateful few months of partnership in Arles, Vincent recreated with Gauguin the actual jealousies, rivalries, and tensions of the Tre Corone. These conflicts with Gauguin, and the resulting failure to realize his utopian Tre Corone-inspired artistic collaboration, precipitated Van Gogh’s mental breakdown in December 1888 and subsequent confinement in asylums at Saint-Rémy and, finally, Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890.

  • Horns: Vikings, Adaptation, Evolution

  • Edited by Karl Fugelso
  • Book:
    Studies in Medievalism XXVIII
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019, pp 133-148

  • Summary

    In 2011, Bethesda Game Studios released the action role-playing videogame Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.The game environment, a lovingly rendered open world, is based on the history, mythology, and geography of medieval Scandinavia. The packaging and a major proportion of the marketing material for the game feature the figure of a muscular man wearing medieval armor, with horns on his helmet that point downwards over his ears. This Dovahkiin or “dragon-born” avatar that players hope to emulate is a Viking, and the downward turn of his horns is more significant than might appear at first glance. I open with the example of the Dovahkiin because it is emblematic of a distinct moment in the representation of Vikings, in a distinct medium. This essay seeks to understand the moments and media of such representations through the lens of adaptation theory, extending it via the metaphor of evolution. Any medievalist will tell you, with varying shades of outrage, that no historical evidence supports Vikings wearing horns on their helmets. Such adornments would have made armor cumbersome and, more importantly, vulnerable: one angled knock would have removed the helmet. At all three major Viking-themed museums in the UK and Eire – Jorvik in York, England; Vikingar in Largs, Scotland; and Dublinia in Dublin, Ireland – interpretation boards and tour guides emphatically dispel the myth of Viking horns. It is an absence that has to be made repeatedly present. Louise D’Arcens tells of the tour guides in Jorvik wearing full Viking regalia with “alien bobbles” on their heads, “a very telling reflection of the necessity of evoking yet also avoiding the discredited horned helmet image of the Viking.”The recent turn towards representing a gritty, so-called realistic version of the Middle Ages for adult consumption in popular media has seen a waning in the use of horned helmets, for example in Michael Hirst’s television series Vikings (2013) or Brian Wood’s graphic-novel series Northlanders (2012), but horns still predominate. For example, they are comically ostentatious in Dreamworks’s 2010 film How to Train your Dragon, a menacing feature of Loki’s Aesir costume in Marvel’s Mighty Thor comic series, and an indispensable and highly recognizable aspect of the logo for the Minnesota Vikings football team.

  • 3 - Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni

  • Edited by Christina Gerhardt, Marco Abel
  • Book:
    Celluloid Revolt
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019, pp 53-68

  • Summary

    Introduction:

    Revolutionizing German Society and Film

    The relationship between the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) and the West German student movement was a contentious one. That might come as a surprise, considering that the dffb was founded on the heels of the infamous 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, when twenty-six West German filmmakers rebelliously declared “the old film is dead” and professed the necessity for West German films free of conventions and commercial influence. The institutional effects of the Oberhausen Manifesto were the creation of state funding for film and the creation of three film programs:the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (School of Design Ulm, hfg), led by Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Detten Schleiermacher in 1962, which would close due to financial problems in 1968, as well as the dffb in West Berlin and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film Munich, hff), both founded in 1966.

    According to Hans-Rüdiger Minow, a member of the dffb’s first cohort, he and his fellow students did not identify with the Oberhausen signatories.Directors such as Kluge and Reitz were nearly twenty years older than Minow, who began his studies at age twenty-two and found that the topics and conventions of Young German Cinema were just not sufficiently political for his cohort. While Fabian Tietke acknowledges the ideological break between the generations on the dffb’s website, he does not focus as much on politics as Minow, who states, “there were points of contact to the political interests we had. But that wasn’t decisive. … Rather, it became evident that the coalition failed at the very moment when political interests were at the forefront of a situation instead of libertarian interests, like in the case of the Vietnam War” (Minow). Thus, Minow’s statement points to a gap between philosophy and praxis, not in terms of filmmaking but of political action. The Oberhausen directors may have strived for social changes that reflected more liberal art and lifestyles, but they were not as committed to effecting concrete political change as Minow and his colleagues.

  • Appendices: Genealogies

  • Miles Kerr-Peterson
  • Book:
    A Protestant Lord in James VI's Scotland
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2019
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019, pp 195-210

  • Summary

    Genealogical Tables

    Only the branches that could be linked to the main line of the Earls Marischal are described below, although this comprised all the most important branches. Note that some children before the second Earl Marischal are omitted and children after the hereditary successors are not necessarily placed in birth order. ‘Mr’ indicated the contemporary designation for someone possessing a university degree. Numerals indicate the generations from the first individual on each table, so 1 represents the first generation, 2 the second, and so forth.

    Numbering the Earls Marischal

    It is important to note that in previous publications I have erroneously referred to George as the fourth rather than the fifth Earl Marischal, following the convention of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I am very grateful to Ian Dickson for pointing out this important oversight.

    The 1699 genealogist of the Keiths, then Alexander Nisbett's 1722 System of Heraldry, counted three William Earls Marischal before George – noting William the first earl in 1455, then William, the second earl, known as ‘Harken and Take Heed’, then his grandson, William, the third earl, called ‘William of the Tower’. The Scots Peerage refined the list, adding an additional earl, establishing that William the first Earl Marischal succeeded in 1431 and died 1463; William the second Earl Marischal, his son, died 1483; then William the third Earl Marischal (‘Harken and Take Heed’), his son, died 1527; then William the fourth Earl (‘William of the Tower’), his grandson, died in 1581. In the old series the second and third Earls Marischal had been combined.

    Thomas Innes revised this list in 1927, establishing that the actual first Earl Marischal was the son of the man previously thought to be the first. The man who was the real first earl had succeeded earlier than previously thought in 1446, being made earl in 1458. However, although the ODNB followed this revised convention, it managed to recombine the second and third Earls Marischal.

    Appendix 1. Descent of the Earls Marischal from Hervey de Keith to Edward de Keith

  • Hervey de Keith, King's Marischal. Active 1178–1199.

  • Malcolm de Keith. Active 1190–1220.

  • Philip de Keith, Marischal. Active from 1189. Dead by 1225.

  • Hervey de Keith, Marischal. Active from 1230. Dead by 1250.

  • Sir John de Keith, Marischal. Active by 1234. Dead by 1270.

  • 5 - Men and Boys of the Court

  • from PART II - WARDROBE BIOGRAPHIES
  • Melanie Schuessler Bond
  • Book:
    Dressing the Scottish Court, 1543–1553
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019, pp 279-380

  • Summary

    The largest group of recipients in the regency Accounts was made up of men and boys of good family who were attached to the court in some way. Those receiving the most clothes and accessories were of course members of Arran's immediate family, but he also granted items to more distant relations and political or personal associates. To complicate matters, relatives of the Regent and other well-born people often served as household staff or in other positions in the government that Arran directly supervised and might receive clothing as a perquisite. Those serving the court and the Regent may be found in Chapter 7, while those serving others are listed in Chapter 8.

    Aside from Arran himself, the men and boys of the court had the most formal and expensive wardrobes of any males in the regency Accounts. They were more likely to have gowns rather than just coats and cloaks, and the quality of materials they wore was on average quite good, with a relatively high percentage of velvets and other silks as well as the more expensive wools. Some had passementerie braid or strips of velvet to trim their clothes. They were also the most likely to receive a full outfit of gown, coat, doublet, and hose, but items such as shirts, gloves, and shoes were usually reserved for close family members.

    Men and boys of the court were also most likely to have wedding clothing provided for them. Rather than being a specific type of formal wear, wedding clothes for men were simply the best quality that could be purchased. These would then be added to the wardrobe and worn for other occasions in the future. In contrast, garments for mourning were spread across the social spectrum.

    Among adult men in this category, clothing of which the color was specified was overwhelmingly black with some white and gray and a few instances of tawny, purple, and red. Boys had a larger percentage of the lighter and brighter colors in the men's range, with occasional touches of blue, yellow, and green in addition. Doublets and hose were more likely to be made in colors other than black, although coats and gowns were sometimes lighter.

  • 1 - Politics and Governance

  • Audrey M. Thorstad
  • Book:
    The Culture of Castles in Tudor England and Wales
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 October 2019
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019, pp 21-50

  • Summary

    Thomas Starkey, the sixteenth-century English political theorist and humanist, famously published A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset between 1529 and 1532. This dialectic – taking its precedent from classical works – was an attempt to gain royal favour from Henry VIII. Instead, it was Thomas Cromwell who took notice of Starkey and commissioned him to write a lengthy sermon entitled An exhortation to the people instructynge theym to Unitie and Obedience, published in 1535. Both works used the idea of the body politic to endorse the ‘natural’ hierarchy of society while enhancing the authority of the monarch, and, undoubtedly, both were written with the contemporary affairs of the Tudor court and the wider European events of the Reformation in mind. In the Dialogue Starkey makes the argument that all forms of governance derive from the king, stating that ‘from the pryncys & rularys of the state commyth al lawys ordur & pollycy, al jusyce virtue & honesty’. The metaphor of the body politic – the concept of understanding the nation and governance functioning as a body, with the ruler as the head – popularised by John of Salisbury in his twelfth-century Policraticus, was subsequently employed by numerous writers, including Starkey. These writings argued that it was the head, or the ruler, who controlled the health and wellbeing of the rest of the body, or the kingdom. If the king – physically or symbolically – was ill, then his kingdom would also suffer the consequences. The importance of the ruler in early modern society has been echoed by scholarship focusing on politics, governance, and power, with the king as the central focus. This chapter will move away from the head of governance and look instead to the king's wider support network, which helped him to govern in the localities: the nobility. Four principal themes will be considered in order to explore the ways in which the nobility attempted to consolidate and expand their power on a regional level. The first is the ownership of lands and the acquisition of royal patronage. Land ownership was pivotal for maintaining control of a specific area and one way to bulk out a small inheritance was to obtain royal grants that added to a lord's income. The second is the military duties that would have been expected from the leading families in the localities.

  • 5 - Scholarship as a Weapon: Herbert of Bosham's Letter Collection

    • By Julie Barrau, Lecturer in Medieval British History at the Faculty of History, Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College.
  • Edited by Michael Staunton
  • Book:
    Herbert of Bosham
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 March 2019
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019, pp 87-103

  • Summary

    HERBERT of Bosham's letter collection would be totally lost if it were not for a single fourteenth-century copy, today in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 123, fols. 1r–64v. It consists of forty-eight letters and letter fragments. Only partially edited by J. A. Giles in the mid-nineteenth century, the letters, which are written in complex and flowery Latin, have been largely neglected, although some of them were included by Robertson in the Materials for the History of Archbishop Thomas Becket. Anne Duggan has established with great clarity the (limited) contribution that the collection makes to the much greater body of the Becket correspondence. Eleven letters are presented as drafted by Herbert ‘in persona Thomae’, but for most of them it is difficult to say that they were ever actually sent. Only two appear in the main Becket collections, with textual differences from the text extant in the Herbert collection. Two letters drafted by Herbert seem to have been rejected by the archbishop and a parallel version actually sent. Another three may have been actually sent, although Anne Duggan did not include them in her edition.

    However, the letters written on behalf of Becket constitute only a small part of the collection as we have it. There are also twenty letters written in Herbert's own name, as well as three letters sent to him. There is an intriguing addition: Ne in dubium, the text of the settlement established at Avranches in 1172 between Henry II and the papacy. The last extant element in the collection is a fragment completely ignored by Giles, probably because it bears no rubric or other obvious identifiable feature.

    Herbert's letters have been overlooked for centuries, and the few people who have taken notice were not always won over. The Latin in which the letters are composed is difficult and convoluted, and they are long winded. They were also edited by a man who had, both literally and metaphorically, little time for them. As Nicholas Vincent shows in another chapter, Giles had to go fast when he edited the letters, and he had other concerns on his mind. This accounts for the frequent transcription mistakes, but not necessarily for Giles's decision to discard about a quarter of the collection.

The Culture of Castles in Tudor England and Wales

  • 4 - Rationality and Mysticism in the Restoration, 1660–1690

  • Liam Peter Temple
  • Book:
    Mysticism in Early Modern England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019, pp 109-138

  • Summary

    In Chapter 3 we saw a growing scepticism towards the legitimacy of mysticism in England. This originated from two different bodies of thought: those who saw mysticism as a symptom of melancholy and enthusiasm, and those who critiqued the historical validity of figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius and the pagan roots of the doctrines of mysticism. Both arguments were driven to some degree by the sectarian mysticism explored in Chapter 2. Here we see these concepts electrified by currents of Restoration anti-Catholicism and a latitudinarian emphasis on rationality as a key tenet of faith. Arguments over the validity of mysticism were swept up into much fiercer debates between the Benedictine Serenus Cressy and the Anglican divine Edward Stillingfleet concerning the role of rationality in religion, the origins of fanaticism and the validity of tradition as a source of doctrinal authority. These issues were symptomatic of a much larger concern for Protestants in England over the visible Catholic presence at the court of Charles II. As a result, mysticism was transformed into a tool with which some English Protestants could slander and invalidate their Catholic opponents in polemical debates. To practise mysticism, or even be accused of supporting a belief in mystical experience, was to be labelled as irrational, enthusiastic, and most importantly for those seeking to limit the influence of Catholics, potentially seditious.

    The fallout from these debates cannot be understated. Mysticism was labelled as an anti-rational practice and something to be ridiculed and treat with the utmost suspicion. It was also attributed to an underlying and untreated melancholy which caused delusionary experiences. Those claiming mystical visions were mocked for being unable to see the underlying natural causes of their supposedly supernatural experiences. The debates between Cressy and Stillingfleet would continue to play a role in later discussions of mysticism, both by those attempting to validate mysticism and those attempting to dismiss it as delusional. As we explored in the Introduction to this book, Cressy's definition of mysticism as ‘a nearer, a more familiar, and beyond all expression comfortable conversation with God’ was one repeated in dictionaries and clerical handbooks in the seventeenth century.

  • 3 - Service to the State, 1595–1623

  • Miles Kerr-Peterson
  • Book:
    A Protestant Lord in James VI's Scotland
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2019
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019, pp 72-90

  • Summary

    As Marischal's feud with Huntly drew to a close, his participation in court politics declined sharply. He continued to attend court, but, with the threat from the centre lifted, Marischal concentrated the majority of his time and effort in the localities and, as we will see in chapter five, increasingly delegated his responsibilities to his son and heir. There would be other feuds, detailed in chapter four, but none would draw him into high politics in the same way. Most of the earl's activities at the royal court and centre of government therefore concerned his relationship with the king and his services to the state, the focus of this chapter. ‘Services to the state’ in this context refers to positions of power that Marischal held from the crown, such as his positions as marischal, as a member of the privy council or as hereditary sheriff of the Mearns.

    There is a broad consensus that the reign of James VI saw far reaching changes in the relationship between the nobility and the state, as well as in the overall nature of government. Julian Goodare's study of the mechanisms of the Jacobean government perceived a growing intensification in the processes of state-building between 1560 and 1625, exaggerated by the Union of the Crowns, where the nobles were increasingly confined to advising the king or serving a more centralised royal government, rather than governing the localities on behalf of the king. This shift was achieved through interventions into the nobles’ old mechanisms of power, such as reforming sheriff courts. The nobility still retained a central role in the government of Scotland, while also maintaining their strong regional powerbases, meaning that the state was still essentially aristocratic, but their autonomy and power had been fundamentally eroded. Although this is largely seen as the outcome of James’ reign, its causes are more debatable. Julian Goodare emphasised the intentional development of government, while continuity has been stressed by Jenny Wormald and Keith Brown, who saw these changes as more to do with the end of a period of disruption caused by royal minority and civil war. For them, these changes were reactive and incremental, and not part of a self-consciously designed plan.

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