The sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries saw the development of a British identity that was contingent upon a shared dynasty through intermarriage and the composite monarchy of James VI and I, religious developments that led to both Scotland and England breaking with the Roman Catholic Church, and especially England’s overseas colonial empire. Using sources representative of the nascent print culture, the Calendar of State Papers, the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, and Journals from the House of Commons, this project argues that contrary to prior historical analysis of Britain, empire, and English imperialism that British identity in the sixteenth century became a collaborative process which included both Scots and English. With this in mind, the project suggests that historians must incorporate Scottish angles to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that future studies should include analysis of Scots in the early Atlantic and English imperial worlds.

Between Figure and Line: Visual Transformations of Cartesian Physics, 1620-1690 is the first sustained examination of the diagrams and illustrations that constituted the seventeenth century's new physics. When René Descartes introduced natural philosophy to the graphic techniques of geometry, mixed mathematics, cartography, and master engravers, subsequent interpreters of the new science were encouraged to respond in kind. But none of their pictures - neither the outlines of barometric tubes employed by Parisian salon impresario Jacques Rohault, nor the still lifes and landscapes into which Leiden university professor Wolferd Senguerd etched Cartesian matter, and certainly not the copies of Descartes's figures with which Jesuit priest Gabriel Daniel refuted the new philosophy - agreed on a single visual idiom for revealing nature's laws. Such pictorial diversity, I argue, marked the natural philosophical figure as a critical, and contested, apparatus for grasping at truth amidst the slow disintegration of Aristotelian certainty. / History of Science