This collection of essays provides a broad and rigorous study of George Buchanan’s reputation in the two centuries following his death in 1582. Tuned to insular and Continental political discourses, the editors, Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason, manage to chart, quite literally in the case of Mason, the fallout of Buchanan’s political writings in Scotland, England, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Lithuania, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although the historical range of the essays is from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, most scholars focus on “the political, historical, and polemical” (1) reception and interpretation of Buchanan’s works De Maria Scotorum Regina (1571), De Iure Regni (1579), and Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) in the seventeenth century.

In the preface, Erskine and Mason declare the collection to be one that shows how and why a study of Buchanan’s reputation is difficult, but they also detail why it is important. They contend that though Buchanan’s ideas were used and misused and shaped and misshaped by those who admired him and his works and those who did not, it is precisely this conflict that provides the real “picture of Buchanan’s reputation,” one that “is more richly textured, idiosyncratic and even contradictory” (8). I should say so. In order to make the disparate nature of the essays more cohesive and manageable, Erskine and Mason have divided the work into four sections, containing three or four essays per section: part 1: “Buchanan in Reformation Britain”; part 2: “Buchanan in Europe”; part 3: “Buchanan and Revolutionary Britain”; and part 4: “Buchanan and the Enlightenment.”

As one might expect, since the authors are generally writing about the same three works there is a good deal of repeated information; nevertheless, the volume succeeds, and offers a few standout chapters, including the first one, Roger Mason’s essay on the chorography of Buchanan’s Historia in Blaeu’s Atlas. Mason makes the point that Buchanan’s Historia becomes the standard for setting Scottish historical identity and self-fashioning during the seventeenth century, and his essay builds a foundation upon which McElroy's, Hadfield's, and Williamson’s essays peer into the insular reputation of Buchanan from Spenser to Melville, with a good deal of time spent on Camden as well. Astrid Stilma’s essay also stands out. Hers is a meticulous treatment of the translations of Buchanan’s De Iure Regni by Ellert de Veer and his Baptistes by Jermias de Decker, which she shows to be politically significant during the rise of Oldenbarnevedlt in the Netherlands and after the execution of Charles I in England and Scotland, respectively. Additionally, her essay, on the one hand, paves the way for von Friedeburg to show how the concept of monarchomach in Germany was tied to concepts of patriotism — which Williamson, in chapter 4, also writes about, but in a Franco-Scottish context — that only partly agree with Buchanan’s advocacy of political resistance. On the other hand, it neatly allows Macinnes to portray the exportation and adaptation of Buchanan’s ideas via Scottish Covenanters during the rokosz movement in mid-seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania, a most fascinating subject. Finally, Clare Jackson’s article on Sir James Turner offers a remarkable look at a literary and political treatment of Buchanan from a Scottish-Royalist perspective. Turner, imitating “sueño del infierno” from Francisco de Quevedo’s Sueños y Discursos, writes “Buchanan in Hell,” a vision story that puts Buchanan in hell with Macbeth and Julius Caesar, among others. (In a later vision story, Turner has Cromwell and Oxenstierna taking on Buchanan’s role in hell.) Certainly, Turner’s treatment of Buchanan is quirky, but through Jackson’s analysis it reveals Buchanan’s unconventional, lasting, and complicated reputation, both in Scotland and around the Baltic Sea. The other essays contained within this volume demonstrate this complexity, too, and range in content from Ciceronian concepts of tyranny to articulations of assassination.

In sum, this volume has much to offer. Each essay is a compelling read, making the work a valuable reference tool for those scholars interested in specific moments of the reception of Buchanan’s political ideas — especially during the seventeenth century.