Afterword: The Renaissance of Roger Mason

Summary

IT was a pleasure to introduce the day conference in honour of Roger in which this collection of essays had its genesis, and to welcome everyone to it. It was also a pleasure to spend a day listening to the expertise of those engaging in discussion of subjects that Roger has made so much his own: Scottish historiography; humanism and literacy; Scottish political and religious thought; John Knox; George Buchanan; James VI and I; Scotland and England; Scotland and Europe; the Scottish Renaissance (if there was one); and the Declaration of Arbroath. We really needed a week rather than a day to do all of this justice.

Roger and I first met in the summer of 1985 in Edinburgh at a conference on sovereignty held by the Traditional Cosmology Society, where Roger was brave enough to be giving a paper and neither of us really had a clue about much else that was going on. The conference was largely dominated by anthropologists talking about incest and Louise Fradenburg talking about Lacan. The paper that Roger was giving was to become one of his most significant contributions to the literature of sovereignty and political thought in Scotland, and I estimate that hearing it held up the completion of my doctoral thesis by a good six months – but only for the better. This was ‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, published first in SHR in 1987, and then published again in slightly revised form in Roger's magisterial Kingship and the Commonweal in 1998. (I have to say parenthetically here that I do – dimly – recall helping Roger celebrate the publication of that book at a conference Nicola Royan organised at St Andrews in 1999. The following day there was a total eclipse of the sun, and I have rarely been more grateful for one given the size of my hangover.)

‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist’ showed many of the characteristics of Roger's subsequent writing, along with the qualities that have made his work so accessible and so important to literary scholars as well as his fellow historians.