This is a past event
SOCIETY, POLITY, LAW AND HINTERLANDS, C. 1400-C. 1800
The Aberdeen Burgh Records project is a pilot study bringing together investigators in history, law, and archives to explore Aberdeen’s exceptionally rich late medieval and early modern records. Whereas the technical core of the project is concerned with the recently-captured images of the council registers from before 1563, the wider conceptual aim spans the four centuries from c. 1400 to c. 1800. Within this framework, the conference seeks to stimulate further the use of Scottish urban records for more than ‘urban’ history. Rather than a concern with internal institutional burghal or economic development, the focus shifts to the ‘provincial town’, its political articulations, and its local, national and international interactions. The event will explore how the idea of the ‘provincial’ might signify more than a ‘peripheral’ or ‘marginal’ significance, and interrogate demarcations of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. How did Aberdeen and comparable towns in Northern Europe serve as social hubs for landowners from the hinterlands, and for burgesses, craftsmen and other inhabitants with land and office beyond the town, as well as for merchants and shipmen from overseas? Another perspective concerns the expression and exercise of political and legal authority. How, by whom, and for what purposes were authoritarian and communitarian strands of political thought deployed in such towns? Aberdeen’s council registers are predominantly court records: What laws and customs were applied within the town, and under what jurisdictions? What sorts of wrongs were heard before these courts, and what mechanisms were used to remedy them? By addressing these topics over a long period, and by adopting a comparative Northern European perspective, this event begins the interrogation of Aberdeen as a ‘provincial metropolis’ in Renaissance and early modern Scotland, to explore how it interlocked with seats of power elsewhere and, by extension, to stimulate a re-evaluation of the Scottish polity and its pronounced regionalism in this period. With additional support from The North Theme, the Civil Law Centre and the Centre for Early Modern Studies
- Hosted by
- RIISS, University of Aberdeen
- Venue
- HMG1, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds