TYRANNY AND LIBERTY, RESISTANCE AND REGICIDE: POLITICAL ASSASSINATION IN JOHN GALT’S THE SPAEWIFE

Abstract

Though its use declined after the Middle Ages, the chronicle long remained the genre of choice for those unsatisfied with conventional histories. John Galt, a Scottish Romantic author currently enjoying renewed critical interest, demonstrates the political applications of the chronicle, in both form and content, as a means of harnessing Britain’s distant past to come to terms with the material and philosophical developments of the long eighteenth century.