Conceiving a Nation

This new edition in The New History of Scotland series, replacing Alfred Smyth’s Warlords and Holy Men (1984), covers the history of Scotland in the period up to 900 AD. A great deal has changed in the historiography of this period in the intervening three decades: an entire Pictish kingdom has moved nearly a hundred miles to the north; new archaeological finds have forced us to rethink old assumptions; and the writing of early medieval history is beginning to struggle out of the shadow of later medieval sources which have too often been read rather naively and without sufficient regard for their implicit ideological agenda. Gilbert Márkus brings a stimulating approach to studying this elusive period, analysing both its litter of physical evidence as well as its literary sources – what he calls ‘luminous débris’ – as a method of shedding light on the reality of the period. In doing so, he reforms our historical perceptions of what has often been dismissed as a ‘dark age’.