This book assesses the everyday use of petitions in administrative and judicial settings and contrasts these with more assertive forms of political petitioning addressed to assemblies or rulers.

Karin Bowie is Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, UK. She studies the nature and impact of public opinion and participative politics in early modern Scotland and has a forthcoming monograph on Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland, c.1560-1707.

Thomas Munck is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, UK, where his research has focused on comparative European social, cultural and political history. He co-chairs an international seminar on Cultural Translation and his book Conflict and Enlightenment: Print and Political Culture in Europe 1635-1795 was published in 2019.

Introduction

Karin Bowie and Thomas Munck

1. From customary to constitutional right: the right to petition in Scotland before the 1707 Act of Union

Karin Bowie

2. Neither inside nor outside the corridors of power: prosaic petitioning and the royal burghs in early modern Scotland

Alan R. MacDonald

3. Petitioning in early seventeenth-century Scotland, 1625-51

Laura A.M. Stewart

4. Petitioning in the Scottish church courts, 1638-1707

Alasdair Raffe

5. The petition in the Court of Session in early modern Scotland

John Finlay

6. Parliament, printed petitions and the political imaginary in seventeenth-century England

Jason Peacey

7. Petitioning, addressing and the historical imagination: the case of Great Yarmouth, England 1658-1784

Ted Vallance

8. Petitions and 'legitimate' engagement with power in absolutist Denmark 1660-1800

Thomas Munck