Why and how did Edinburgh become the major centre for royal government in late medieval Scotland? The talk traces the development of Edinburgh as a royal administrative and residential centre in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries until its formal emergence as the kingdom’s capital in the reign of James III (1460-88).
Speaker
Professor Steve Boardman
Professor Steve Boardman was born in Dunfermline, Fife in 1963 but spent the bulk of his childhood in Hertfordshire and Kent where he developed an interest in cricket. Steve returned to Scotland to study English at St Andrews University and then to study history.
After three years, he stumbled into the James IV Special Subject run by Dr Norman Macdougall. The enthusiasm, good humour and excitement that characterised Norman’s teaching set him on the path to postgraduate study and a lifetime of an academic career path. Steve finished his PhD at St Andrews in 1989 and thereafter held two postdoctoral fellowships in the same institution before spending two years as a Lecturer in History at Aberdeen. In 1997 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Scottish History in Edinburgh, promoted to a Senior Lectureship and then a Readership in History.