Politics, Prophecy, Poetry: The Melvillian Moment, 1589-96, and its Aftermath

The 1589-96 alliance between the Scottish Presbyterians and James VI led to more than the triumph of the new church polity. It also promoted new directions in poetry, cartography, law and, perhaps most notably, eschatology - the years witnessing an integrated and coherent cultural flowering that is largely unrecognised today. Underwriting all these developments was a new confidence in the Scottish future (the neologism 'patriot' having just appeared in the later 1580s). The collapse of the alliance in late 1596 threw the Presbyterian movement on the defensive and increasingly redirected its intellectual energies toward more narrow horizons.