A welcome contribution to Covenanter historiography, Laura A. M. Stewart's Rethinking the Scottish Revolution. Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651 is presented in two parts. The first, “The Making of Covenanted Scotland,” addresses the formation of the Covenanting movement by applying new methodologies to explore the forging of popular politics and a politicized public (chapter 1); the process of subscribing or swearing the National Covenant in shaping individual and corporate identities (chapter 2); and, the development of competing historical and intellectual narratives by Covenanters and their opponents (chapter 3). Innovative as it is, part one presents some challenges that will be addressed later in this review. Part two, “Covenant Scotland,” is the more effective portion. In it Stewart builds on her earlier work on the innovations of governance necessary to allow the Covenanter state to function (chapter 4). These mechanisms were rooted in preexisting local networks, both ecclesiastical (presbytery) and secular (shire and burgh) and allowed the transformation from a “protesting movement” to a functional government (189). In chapter 5 Stewart examines the relationship between the centralized Covenanter state and local agents, usually lesser gentry or of middling rank, empowered to keep their social superiors accountable. Allan Kennedy's recent Governing Gaeldom (2014) identified this as indicative of Restoration governance as well. The chapter also explores the means by which the state legitimated itself and the ways the population could demonstrate resistance, particularly to excessive taxation.

The most important aspect of Stewart's study is the analysis of the way Covenanters cast the National Covenant as a guarantor of rights while at the same time delimiting acceptable interpretation. In this respect, Stewart provides a thought-provoking analysis of the 1646 Act of Classes, which defined malignancy and transgressions of the Covenanting cause, as well as the oft-neglected Cross Petition (1648) which challenged the imperial ambitions of the Solemn League and Covenant. Here Stewart begins to address the inherent problem of fragmentation within the Covenanting movement, although the competing tensions between the two covenants are under developed, as is the complexity of individuals like James Graham, first marquess of Montrose, who prioritized the crown's cause. On several occasions Stewart lumps Montrose and the Irish confederate Alasdair MacColla together without considering their ideological differences. Ultimately Stewart argues that the National Covenant served as a tool for forging a “Confessional state,” wherein the kirk played a prominent role through press and pulpit, provided networks onto which mechanisms of governance could be mapped, and served as the foundation for a Scottish tradition of collective agency.

Stewart focuses part one and chapter 6 on the forming of a political population. While there is good reason to pursue such a line of inquiry, Stewart's assertion that the employment of popular politics is something new to Covenanting Scotland is problematic. Two strands of popular action were well rooted in Scotland, the first being the iconoclasm evidenced in the Reformation, which was at least threatened in the famous Edinburgh protests of 1596, and the second being the long tradition of regional magnates martialing their inferiors to assert authority in the face of a weak monarchy. In both cases, mustering popular action occurred through the mechanism of noble, elite, and ecclesiastical influence, something that is equally clear in this book. Thus, Stewart's claims that popular mobilization was something distinctive to Covenanting needs qualification.

Perhaps more importantly, so too do claims that Scotland experienced widespread popular debate and the creation of a public sphere. Nothing like the open market of ideas that dominated Revolutionary England appeared in Scotland. As Stewart's own account explains, royal proclamations and counter protestations in 1638 represented polarized, bilateral exchanges that did not invite open discourse or alternative views. So, claims for popular discourse are overstretched. Despite Stewart's claims, there was little use of printing presses for domestic Scottish markets. Presses were strictly regulated and employed primarily for an English audience. Satirical critiques surviving in manuscript originated from a highly-educated social elite with circulation limited to small audiences. The idea that people possessed copies of the National Covenant as cherished personal items is unlikely and unsubstantiated by the nature and number of surviving copies. Copies were distributed through carefully controlled channels to individual parishes where they were read publicly and then sworn or subscribed. These were public events binding the body of the people together, rather than primarily privatized actions.

The assertion of local corporate rights is evidenced by Stewart in the parish of Glassford's complaint over perceived impropriety by the presbytery in planting a minister. Yet this rested less on the National Covenant, though it was referenced, than on ambiguities over congregational rights in the Books of Discipline that led to numerous contested inductions and instances of congregations defending deposed ministers. However, these events are not discussed within the framework of contested Presbyterian polity that included the vexed question of patronage before the radical post-Engagement parliament abolished it in 1649. Discussion of this dynamic could have enhanced the analysis of internal discourse in defining post-Covenant Presbyterianism. Another missing component is a much-needed exploration of the limits of autonomy. No mention is made of the remarkable, but solitary, Covenanter prophetess Margaret Michelson, nor Aberdeen's Otto Ferrendale, whose house-conventicling the Presbytery of Aberdeen believed forced subscription of the National Covenant would remedy.

Overall Stewart's book provides a welcome contribution to early modern historiography, which may prompt further new work on the Covenanters. Albeit this will likely counter some of her claims in relation to existing historiography. Stewart's claims about popular politics rest on English historiography and underappreciate the work of David Stevenson, but also Peter Donald, Ted Cowan, and Allan Macinnes, who argue that the National Covenant represented a reassertion of traditional rights of Scotland's Estates (minus the clerical), or, as Walter Makey put it, “a feudal body feeling its way back into an idealised version of the past” (The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651: Revolution and Social Change in Scotland [1979]), 23). The Commonwealth perceived this as well, which is why it abolished Scotland's heritable jurisdictions, feudal superiorities and the General Assembly in efforts to create their own vision of a public sphere.