Building Early Modern Edinburgh: A Social History of Craftwork and Incorporation

Much like in the present day, building a house in the sixteenth century involved masons, carpenters and glaziers, among others, and in many cities such trades had separate companies to govern their own affairs. In Edinburgh, however, they banded together in a single body – the Edinburgh Incorporation of Mary’s Chapel.

Building Early Modern Edinburgh traces the history of the organisation, which sought to control the capital’s building trades and defend their privileges. By utilising a range of previously missing charters and archival documents, the author offers a new perspective on the prestigious and important craft guild in its 543 years of existence. Developing a crucial theme of ‘composite corporatism’, and using the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘household’ to approach an urban institution, this book is a valuable resource of comparative material for the study of craft guilds and urban history in a global context.

• Uses the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘household’ to explore the institution of the craft guild
• Develops the concept of ‘composite corporatism’, where multiple crafts were included in one corporate body – an aspect of European corporatism often missing from the historiography
• Utilises previously unused sources, including a group of over fifty charters and five sixteenth-century minute books, which were lost sometime after 1923 and only recently rediscovered through the Mary’s Chapel Project
• Deepens our understanding of an institution which helped build a UNESCO World Heritage Site