Dr Laura Doak
I was fascinated by early modern Scotland from the earliest stages of undergraduate study. Building on this interest, I completed my PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2020, with a thesis titled ‘On Street and Scaffold: The People and Political Culture in Restoration Scotland, c.1678-1685’. My thesis examined various cultural practices – including protests, processions, and public executions – to argue that, in order to understand the political participation of pre-modern people, we should focus on these cultural media, as the communicative channels that enabled political debate, rather than a particular ‘elite’ or ‘popular’ stratum of a society or, likewise, any one single mode of communication, like speech or print. I continue to explore both sides of these conventional dichotomies, with published and forthcoming work on militant ‘covenanters’, treasonous protestations, royal progresses, and Privy Council proclamations.
I am thrilled to play a role in the Scottish Privy Council Project. As both the face and facilitators of day-to-day government in pre-Union Scotland, the rich mass of unpublished source material left behind by the Privy Council offers an immense opportunity to investigate their cultural interactions with those they ruled. In particular, I am keen to explore the council’s evolving use of print as a means to communicate with the people and how this may have influenced Scottish political culture at large. I also hope to find out more about the ‘rising’ of the Scottish Privy Council, a public procession largely forgotten following the council’s closure in 1708. I look forward to researching these issues whilst contributing to the online scholarly edition of the Scottish Privy Council Register, 1692-1708 that will form an immensely important resource for future work on this important yet often understudied period.
Dr Clare Loughlin
I studied History as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, graduating in 2011. After a break from academic life I returned to complete an MSc part-time at the University of Edinburgh. In 2016 I embarked on a PhD in History, also at the University of Edinburgh, which I completed in 2020. My thesis examined anti-Catholicism and the Church of Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century, particularly how attitudes towards ‘popery’ were affected by the emerging fragmentation of Scottish Presbyterianism. Anti-Catholicism continues to be a topic of particular fascination, but I am interested in all aspects of religious history in the early modern period across the British Isles.
I am especially interested in examining the Privy Council’s relationship with the established Church after 1690, and its members’ attitudes towards religious dissidents. More broadly, I am very excited by the public nature of the project. By making these records available online I hope that the project will provide an invaluable resource for researchers, significantly enhancing our understanding of how the Privy Council worked after 1690, and providing new insights into the nature of government in Scotland in this formative period.