Scottish constitutional history has become a subject of much interest in recent decades. Since the Union came into force in May 1707, Scotland has been one component of a complex and dynamic state. The Union itself has been described as an ‘enigma’ that defies easy or conventional definitions.1 Britain is simultaneously ‘unitary’, in the sense that sovereign power, to this day, rests with the ‘crown-in-parliament’ at Westminster, and ‘pluralistic’, because the Treaty continues to guarantee Scotland (more than Wales and Northern Ireland) considerable autonomy in civil affairs.2 In this respect, the establishment of a Scottish parliament in 1999 is simply the belated democratisation of what has always been a distinct ‘national’ politics. It has also (re)kindled debates on Scotland’s possible constitutional futures and this has included reflection on Scotland’s pre-Union heritage. These debates were aided by the creation of an accessible online edition of the records of the Scottish parliament to 1707.3 The renewed interest in Scottish parliamentary history has complemented endeavours in the field of political thought, where attention has focused on the centrality of kingship to Renaissance and early modern discourses. Certain questions have been thrown into sharper relief as a consequence of these inter-related developments. How did abstracted conceptualisations of the political community inform the ways in which people engaged with its governing and representative institutions? How were the boundaries of legitimate political action negotiated and renegotiated over time? To what principles were political actors expected to conform and what happened when those principles were challenged?

The main questions concerning English governance addressed by medieval theorists were: (a) the division of authority between the Church, headed by the Pope, and the king; (b) the extent to which the king was bound by law and custom; (c) whether he was bound to act with the counsel and consent of his magnates; and (d) whether he could legitimately be resisted or even deposed for violating moral, religious, customary or legal constraints.

It is time to put God back into readings of the British constitution. Writings about that constitution since 1945 have often focused on technicalities and processes of the constitutional order – whether the law, Parliament, or territorial politics – rather than the constitution as a lived idea. Yet states, beneath the daily reality of their role as legal entities claiming monopolies of violence over the territories they purportedly control, are fundamentally ideas.

The thirteenth-century kingdom of England was a political, jurisdictional and administrative unit consisting of thirty-nine contiguous counties which the Norman and Angevin kings of England had in large part inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors – although two of those counties (Cheshire and Durham) had by the thirteenth century come to enjoy an enhanced degree of autonomy, which for many, if not all, purposes placed them outside direct royal control. The kings of England also possessed a limited degree of control over the marcher lordships of Wales which had been conquered from native Welsh rulers by ‘English’ lords and constituted a barrier between England and the kingdoms of Wales. The rest of Wales remained under the control of native Welsh rulers until Edward I in successive campaigns in the 1270s and 1280s destroyed the last remaining native princes and their independence. He did not annex the conquered Welsh lands to the kingdom of England or dispossess all the conquered Welsh, but he established a separate principality of Wales in the north and west of Wales under English control and in 1301 the king’s eldest son became ‘prince’ of Wales. Edward also imposed a version of English law and of the English local administrative system on this area through the Statute of Wales of 1284.1

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

Kingship and messianic language and ideologies pervade the Apocalypse; however, readers rarely appreciate the extent to which this rhetoric shapes the text. The Introduction explores how and why these lenses have been relegated or ignored altogether in modern scholarship.

Perhaps most influential was F.C. Baur’s notion of the decisive victory of “Pauline” Christianity over “Petrine” Christianity, whereby the “primitive Jewish” conceptions of a coming Messiah of the latter were replaced with “universal” non-Jewish Christologies of the former. This degradation of Jewish messianism in Paul paved the way for future commentators to make even further-reaching claims. For example, Wrede argued that Jesus own self-understanding was non-messianic, while Bousset claimed that gentile Christian communities appropriated Jewish messianic claims, but divested them of their erstwhile Jewish connotations and eventually replaced them altogether.

The so-called Postwar Turn identified the anti-Jewish underpinnings of this trajectory, recognizing both the extent and importance of messianic ideologies throughout New Testament Christologies, including especially in Pauline epistles and Gospel texts.

A prominent theme in the mirror literature is the exceptionalism of the king’s position, a point often presented as the result of divine selection or favour. Many mirror-writers evoke, in various articulations, the notion of the divine mandate – the proposition that the king ruled by virtue of divine choice and with divine support. But the authors bring very different perspectives to this idea; even when they invoke a common repertoire of formulae and metaphors, they employ them to create different meanings. Several authors insist that the singular bounties that the king enjoys are counterbalanced by unparalleled, and burdensome, responsibilities. The texts in this chapter are drawn from Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

In Siam, later Thailand, doctrines of Buddhist kingship fluctuated with the needs of the king and the interests of the legal profession. In the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the transition to constitutional monarchy relied on notions of Buddhist kingship to ’smooth’ this process and indigenize the legal transplant of Western constitutional monarchy. The most important element of this hybridisation was the doctrine of ’the king as source of the constitution,’ which established royal sovereignty in Western, positivist, terms. The prestige of the nineteenth-century European models of constitutional and ‘limited’ monarchies, embodied in royally granted charters, provided a reservoir of doctrines to draw from in order to ‘modernise’ the monarchy in accordance with the newly imported tenets of legal positivism, while consolidating royal authority. In particular, the doctrine of ’granted constitutionalism’ established the king as the sovereign source of the constitution, a modern construct that was easily hybridised with traditional theories of Buddhist kingship. As a result, in present-day Thailand, the principle of royal sovereignty prevails both in doctrine and in practice.

Tibetan ethnohistories of Buddhist law have traditionally revolved around the figure of the seventh-century emperor Songtsen Gampo, codifier of first written Tibetan law code. This code was putatively “based” on the ten Buddhist virtues, enshrined in early Mahāyāna works such as the Daśabhūmika (“The Ten Grounds”). This claim is often debunked by modern constitutional historians, who argue that there is little evidence of any lineage of Buddhist textual sources from India to Tibet at the time to support such a claim. However, a closer reading of Indian Mahayana texts and subsequent Tibetan writings suggests a different interpretation of this claim: that the emperor’s dependence on the ten virtues was seen to be noetic rather than literary. Specifically, that its formulation was a product of his personal qualities as a second ground bodhisattva, which naturally generated virtuous law in a Buddhist sense; and that it was based on ethical objectives rather than a lineage of codified injunctions. In this sense, the Buddhist core of royal law was understood to depend on the personal virtue and wisdom of the lawmaker, rather than the integrity of the codified textual lineage.

Chapter 6 surveys all of the dozen passages in which Pseudo-Hegesippus mentions King David within his narrative. This chapter shows how David is both a classical and a Christian construct within De Excidio and explores the many semantic and rhetorical functions that David performs within the narrative.

Chapter 4, “Ritual Assemblies and the Geopolitics of Zhou Expansion” acknowledges that the early Zhou kings conducted several major, state-level events that combined individual ritual techniques into narrative sequences depicting various potential ways of relating to their political project. This chapter examines how the royal house deployed such events as part of an integrative strategy of ritual suited to the geopolitical environment of the early Western Zhou period.

Chapter 3, “Recognition, Reward, and Patronage under the Zhou Kings” offers a deep analysis of three ritual techniques that provided a framework for soliciting and maintaining support through the distribution of rewards and prestige. It shows how changes in these ritual manifestations of patronage reframed the ideology of membership in the Zhou state, deemphasizing personal allegiance to the Zhou king as individual warrior in favor of a vision of service to the royal house qua state in all its aspects.

The Conclusion to the work summarizes the new perspectives on Zhou ritual that emerge from this analysis. Western Zhou royal ritual, it argues, offers a case study of how ritual continues to shape ideas of self and belonging long after its performance. The book thus stands as an argument for the indispensable role of material-cultural theory in ritual studies.

Chapter 1, “The Politics of Shang Ritual under the Zhou” explores how the early Zhou repurposed ancestral-ritual techniques of Shang provenance to support their quest for legitimacy and lend focus to their efforts at building a new, shared identity.

Chapter 6, “The Ethic of Presence” synthesizes the fine-grained analysis of the previous chapters with a broad-based, quantitative study of royal depictions and provides a general theory of the role of inscribed bronze vessels in the formation of the Zhou state. Drawing on theories of subject–object entanglement, the chapter captures how the ancestral cult and its accoutrements facilitated both the dissemination and the appropriation of royal ideology, helping balance interests within a shared Zhou interaction sphere.

Chapter 2, “The Ritual Figuration of the Zhou Kings” examines the surviving records of a few rare but important ritual techniques that posed symbolic arguments about the relationship of the Zhou king to the social order and the natural world. The details of their implementation, as the chapter shows, reveal an effort to refigure the Zhou kings as qualitatively different from their contemporaries, with a special relationship to the natural world and its products.

The Introduction to the work outlines the history of the study of Western Zhou royal ritual, describing its role in early Chinese and early imperial governance and noting how it came to dominate the historical memory of the Western Zhou period. It then explains the book’s commitment to describe Western Zhou royal ritual from a historically embedded perspective, relying on sources contemporary to the rituals themselves. It explains the advantages and pitfalls of working with bronze inscriptions – the bulk of these sources – and presents a methodological framework for understanding inscriptions through the modern frames of actor-network theory and ritual studies.