Laura Stewart awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship
Posted on Wednesday 14 January 2026
Laura’s project, entitled ‘Making History: Writing Scotland’s Post-Reformation’, aims to assess the significance of Scottish history-writing between Renaissance and Enlightenment. Scotland’s Reformation was amongst the most contentious in European Christendom. A successful ‘popular’ rebellion not only led to the establishment of Scotland as a Protestant state in 1560, but also bred further destabilising ideas: the church should be free from the control of secular authorities; obedience to the secular authorities was conditional on their defence of ‘true religion’; and the ‘true religion’ could be safe only in a ‘limited monarchy’, in which the powers of the ruler were regulated by parliament and subject to law. War, revolutions, and an unstable dynastic union with England made narratives of the recent past, and who got to speak for Scotland’s history, into hotly contested territory.
At the heart of this project are the writings, correspondence, and historical collections of Robert Wodrow (1679-1734), presbyterian cleric and keeper of the library of the University of Glasgow. Study of Wodrow’s collecting and recording practices reveals someone acutely aware of knowledge being lost not only to time, but also to obscurity. Through his personal and institutional connections, Wodrow acquired one of the most important collections of early Stuart, civil war, and Restoration documents yet extant. They became accessible to future generations because Wodrow and his descendants preserved and catalogued them. His endeavours were part of longer-running contests over the status of Protestant history-writing since the Reformation.
To modern scholars, Wodrow himself is something of a paradox. His transnational correspondence reveals the cosmopolitan, lively, and implicitly progressive intellectual culture flourishing in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Scotland. He was part of an international network of individuals who collected coins, manuscripts, and curiosities, shared information about natural history, languages, and antiquities, exchanged news, and bought books and shared them with one another. Such activities determined what source material survived into later ages and how they would be interpreted. They have framed what we can know and write about Scotland, its history, and its relationship with England/Britain into the present day.
Head of the Department of History, Professor Oleg Benesch, says, “We are delighted that Laura’s scholarship has been recognised by such a prestigious organisation as The Leverhulme Trust. It shows the continuing vibrancy of our research culture here at York.” Laura was Deputy Head and Head of Department from 2018 to 2024. She is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for giving her such a wonderful opportunity to pursue her work and to her colleagues in the Department of History for supporting her to make the application.