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Paul R. Hyams, Alice Taylor. The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 285–286, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.285
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The important book The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290, presents a case for a substantially new view of Scotland’s advance in the book’s period to a particular kind of statehood, offering new perspectives to all interested in the medieval state. Alice Taylor reviews and substantially revises the voluminous literature on Scottish governance from the manuscripts and sometimes her own new editions of them. Although clearly out to lay new foundations for future European comparisons, Taylor will, like Tom Lambert in Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (2017), as far as possible focus on the Scottish evidence alone, read in chronological order, and will largely exclude most external material. She cannot, of course, exclude all reference to England, whose Anglo-Norman families constituted so much of the Scottish nobility, and whose influence on royal administration was so pervasive, but, she insists, the result was adaptation, not imitation, and must be judged on its own merits (19).
