Protestant intellectual culture and political ideas in the Scottish universities, ca. 1600-50

Abstract

This article examines the teaching of political ideas at the Scottish universities between 1600 and 1650. It demonstrates that regents did not direct their students toward one consistent Reformed view of political participation as a divinely mandated duty to control sin and advance the true religion, a position frequently advanced in contemporary printed works. Instead, university education provided students with a cross-confessional intellectual framework that emphasized both Augustinian and Aristotelian elements of early modern political thought. These differences would become essential for the languages of political legitimacy advanced by Scottish Reformed intellectuals during the wars of the 1640s.