The Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow is delighted to announce the Eighth Annual John Durkan Memorial Lecture, established and named in honour of Dr John Durkan (1914-2006).

John Durkan was Senior Research Fellow in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, and an intellectual giant of the discipline, specialising in religion, culture and learning in the era of the Scottish Renaissance and Reformation.

The Eighth Annual John Durkan Memorial Lecture will take place on Tuesday 26 March 2024, at 5.30pm, in the Boyd Orr Building, Room 611 Lecture Theatre E. Dr John McCallum will speak on ‘Emotion in Religious Controversy in Jacobean Scotland’.

This lecture will explore the role of emotion in the framing of religious controversy in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Scotland. While recent scholarship has begun to draw more attention to emotional experiences in Scottish Protestantism, the lecture will focus on the way in which emotion was utilised in the framing and expression of arguments between presbytery and episcopacy. This includes the ascription of problematic emotional and ethical motivations to one’s opponents, and the claiming of positive ones. Attention will also be paid to the representation of emotional responses to the conflict amongst a wider section of Scottish opinion. Drawing on relatively familiar polemical sources, correspondence, and narratives, the lecture will suggest new ways of thinking about this formative period in Scottish church politics.

Dr John McCallum is a senior lecturer in History at Nottingham Trent University, and has published widely on the religious and social history of early modern Scotland, most recently Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland (2022).

The lecture will take place in person and online, and will be followed by a wine reception. For full details, including venue, registration and tickets, please follow this link: view the event.