Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland

The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church is a multivolume study by Hughes Oliphant Old that canvasses the history of preaching from the words of Moses at Mount Sinai through modern times. In Volume 1, The Biblical Period, Old begins his survey by discussing the roots of the Christian ministry of the Word in the worship of Israel. He then examines the preaching of Christ and the Apostles. Finally, Old looks at the development and practice of Christian preaching in the second and third centuries, concluding with the ministry of Origen.

This three-volume work comprises over eighty essays surveying the history of Scottish theology from the early middle ages onwards. Written by an international team of scholars, the collection provides the most comprehensive review yet of the theological movements, figures, and themes that have shaped Scottish culture and exercised a significant influence in other parts of the world. Attention is given to different traditions and to the dispersion of Scottish theology through exile, migration, and missionary activity. The volumes present in diachronic perspective the theologies that have flourished in Scotland from early monasticism until the end of the twentieth century. The History of Scottish Theology, Volume I covers the period from the appearance of Christianity around the time of Columba to the era of Reformed Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. Volume II begins with the early Enlightenment and concludes in late Victorian Scotland. Volume III explores the 'long twentieth century'. Recurrent themes and challenges are assessed, but also new currents and theological movements that arose through Renaissance humanism, Reformation teaching, federal theology, the Scottish Enlightenment, evangelicalism, missionary, Biblical criticism, idealist philosophy, dialectical theology, and existentialism. Chapters also consider the Scots Catholic colleges in Europe, Gaelic women writers, philosophical scepticism, the dialogue with science, and the reception of theology in liturgy, hymnody, art, literature, architecture, and stained glass. Contributors also discuss the treatment of theological themes in Scottish literature.

W. E. Gladstone towers over the politics of the nineteenth century. He is known for his policies of financial rectitude, his campaigns to settle the Irish question and his championship of the rights of small nations. He remains the only British Prime Minister to have served for four separate terms. In 1998 an international conference at Chester College brought together Gladstone scholars to mark the centenary of his death, and many of the papers presented on that occasion are published in this volume. Covering the whole of the statesman’s long political life from the first Reform Act to the last decade of the nineteenth century, they range over topics as diverse as parliamentary reform and free trade, Gladstone’s English Nonconformist supporters and his Irish Unionist opponents. A select bibliography, arranged by subject, supplies guidance for further research. The collection forms a tribute, appreciative but critical, to the Grand Old Man of British politics.

"Her Scottish father put her in an institution in Calcutta when she was small. Guilt made her Highland gentry grandfather send for her, but he considered her an encumbrance and boarded her in Elgin. When she was an adolescent, her grandmother enrolled her in an Edinburgh boarding school where she developed a crush on one teacher and received harsh rebukes from the other. Brushed off by the former and chastised by the latter, she retaliated by alleging that they were sexually intimate. The teachers sued for libel; in the case that ensued, she was seen through sexist and racist lenses, constructed as an Other. While the case was still going on, she was married to a Presbyterian minister. If the idea was that he would tame her and make her conformable as other household Janes, the plan failed. He turned out to be a womanizer and Jane took revenge on him by reporting his unchaste behavior to his fellow ministers. Later she made a laughingstock of him by joining another church. Posthumously, she became a mean show-stopping character in a play by Lillian Hellman. Such was the life of Jane Cumming, the biracial woman whose recovered story is the subject of this biography. Spanning three continents and more than two centuries and based on archival research, this offers a sympathetic portrait of the protagonist, seeing her as a resilient figure who, when threatened by figures of authority, took arms against her sea of troubles so as to oppose and end them"--

Scottish Enlightenment is an established area of research interest, and this volume offers new scholarship on key Enlightenment figures whilst placing emphasis on their approach to economic thought.

A revisionist account of the story of the foundations of public health in industrial revolution Britain.