ABSTRACT
The historical writings and political thought of George Buchanan, as Scotland’s foremost Renaissance humanist, carried an international resonance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Buchanan’s influence on state formation in the early modern period may not have been as pervasive as that of his French contemporary Jean Bodin, nor as that of the two foremost jurists of the seventeenth century, the Dutchman Hugo de Groot, alias Grotius, and the German, Samuel Pufendorf. Yet Buchanan, as a supporter of and propagandist for a Protestant Reformation carried out in defiance of the Scottish Crown, made a telling contribution to the relationship between monarchy and the commonwealth in terms of elective kingship, rights of resistance and their exercise in Northern Europe. In the course of the seventeenth century, this contribution had not just a recurring relevance for revolutions, civil wars and state formation within Britain. Through the brokerage of mainly Dutch publishing houses, Buchanan’s writings served to check moves towards absolute monarchy in Denmark-Norway and to justify rebellion within the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.
