Neil McGuigan

2025 Frank Watson Book Prize in Scottish History!

Catriona M.M. Macdonald, The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History. Edinburgh: John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., 2024. ISBN: 9780859767200.

Congratulations, Dr. Macdonald! 🏆🎉

Read the jury's citation: www.uoguelph.ca/arts/scottis...

A Scottish History story :
@scotnational.bsky.social
@heraldscotland.bsky.social
@dailyrecord.co.uk
@scotsman.com
@pressandjournal.co.uk

Thank you Clare, enjoy! :)

Enjoy, & feel free to DM me if you have any questions!

Thanks!

The Máel Coluim III book, brand new in hardback, is available for just £30 (down from £70-100) Abebooks :
www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/Book...

Máel Coluim II, 'Canbeg'

Based on an article currently in press I believe published through Apardjón, the Aberdeen Journal for Scandinavian Studies.

YouTube video by Scottish Society for Northern Studies SSNS Seminar - Scoto Orcadian Relations in the Twelfth century, Dr Neil McGuigan

A recent talk I gave to the Scottish Society for Northern Studies on Earl Harald of Orkney and "12th-century Scoto-Orcadian relations" has been put on YouTube. Includes a new theory about the origins of Harald's branch of the Scottish royal dynasty:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIDR...

Day conference celebrating Glasgow's 850th anniversary. Celebrating with scholarship, and doubling as a commemoration of the work of Norman Shead. Thursday 4 September 2025 -- 10.00 am- 4:30 pm, City Chambers.

Used to have a National Geographic map of the Soviet Union & its ethnic groups on my wall as a kid & developed a peeve when the tv or radio (invariably football-related) referred to something USSR/CIS as 'Russian'. I think I saw the analogy between Russia/USSR and England/UK.

Did some google booking, exact expression is used in various editions of the the 19th-century Beeton encyclopaedias. It could appear that the 1992 author is either 'influenced' by one of these or we have a very a curious manifestation of the 'library of Babel'!

Bad copyediting? The 'Baltic' should make the "European" part redundant. If they writing before the Revolution Livonia was the name of a province of the Russian Empire.

There's a lot of flexibility of course, Mercia, Wessex, Northumbria, they all changed in size, they weren't fixed units over long periods of time. But England was built from component units, it's arguably most natural to use them a bit when you want to give people devolution they can buy in to.

People will mostly accept these regions once they are there. The key to is making people feel they belong. The regions with the convoluted bureaucratic names & no history will struggle, there needs to be legitimacy, authority, etc. Hence groups of shires in their high medieval blocks is one idea.

Not fully serious as a real suggestion, but East Anglia & Wessex surely musts, they are ideal units for devolution in terms of size and historic identity.

Own suggestion from a few years ago, trying to aim at entities ("Home Counties" aside) as analogous to Scotland & Wales as pos., three "legal nations" of England from the 11thc & 12thc ("Mercian law", "Danish law", "West Saxon law") plus Cornwall, Northumbria & East Anglia.

Great to see books stores still thriving, though they are perhaps stretching the definition of 'independent'

No problem, hope you are well Darren!

Travels in Another Country; A Guide to Gaelic Scotland | Acair Books Until relatively modern times Scotland was largely a Gaelic-speaking nation. Areas that were described by Doctor Johnson in 1775 as being as remote and as u ...

Recently received this exciting new book, I really hope the tourist shops stock it. There aren't many quality books on Gaelic Scotland suitable for this kind of audience from real experts like Coinneach Maclean :
acairbooks.com/books/travel...

The Book of Deer, a pocket gospel-book, lying open.

July 11: Feast of Drostan († early C7th), founder-abbot of the Pictish monastery of Deir (Deer). Several dedications to him in NE Scotland including Episcopal church at Old Deer. The old church at Aberdour, Aberdeenshire, claimed his relics. Also Dec 15. The C10th Book of Deer #medievalsky

Thanks. It’s an interesting idea Fiona!

Benjamin Hudson, Macbeth before Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii, 293; black-and-white figures. $37.99. ISBN: 978-0-1975-6753-1. | Speculum: Vol 100, No 3

Recently published, myself reviewing Ben Hudson's *Macbeth before Shakespeare*. Behind paywall, but in summary a good read that would have been a much better piece of scholarship had the author engaged significantly with research produced after the 90s:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Enjoy! 😀

Pleased in particular with 'the chapters by McGuigan, Blanchard, and Weikert [were] particular standouts for this reader'. 🙂

Review of *Reigns of Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig*, eds Blanchard and Riedel, incl. my own contribution on 'Revisiting the End of Northern [English] Independence' in the latest issue of @royalstudies.bsky.social :
rsj.winchester.ac.uk/articles/499...

Secrets of medieval kings revealed by DNA from 900-year-old skeletons New DNA evidence unsettles a nation’s founding myth

Founders of Poland, 'Pictish Piasts'? 'The male skeletons almost all carry a single, rare group of genetic variants on the Y chromosome...today found mainly in Britain. The closest known match belongs to a Pict buried in eastern Scotland in the 5th or 6th cent.'
www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Isabel Bruce queen of Norway

Excellent, I didn't even notice you were in it too, eyeskip I guess!

New publication from myself today:
"The fame and significance of Dunkeld in the tenth and eleventh centuries"
clog.glasgow.ac.uk/ojs/index.ph...