Posts com a Tag ‘Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland/ c.1560–1707 (T)’

This is Karin Bowie’s second book about the history of public opinion in Scotland. Her first, in 2007, examined the period 1699-1707 in depth, covering the debate leading up to the Union of Parliaments.(1) The present book deals with a longer period, and has no single focus like the Union. Instead it discusses a larger range of political debates – and some religious debates, at least to the extent that these affected politics. Nevertheless, the questions driving the new book are similar. What was ‘public opinion‘, and how was it expressed? Or, what were people’s opinions, and how did they express them? The ‘public’ is never a singular thing that has a single opinion. Bowie’s book is thus about debate, and about processes of debate.

When historians discuss public opinion, what often interests us is the balance of opinion on debated topics. Was a given topic ‘popular’ or ‘unpopular’? Would a majority of the population have voted for or against (say) the Reformation at the time when it was being proposed? Historians of the early modern period cannot conduct opinion polls, but we recognise that the opinions that such polls would have measured did exist in some way. When we write of the ‘popularity’ of the Reformation, or indeed of its ‘unpopularity’, we are making statements that are to some extent psephological. Leia Mais