So, there was a post on tumblr quoting a book about how a monastery needed a new copy of Aristotle as a bear had eaten theirs, and after combing through the OP’s blog I thought it was this book.

It was not this book but I don’t regret reading it.

So Duncan set out to publish a paper on how the popular primary sources around Scotland’s succession crisis in 1292 were all heavily English-biased and unreliable, except he discovered that the citations he needed for that outright didn’t exist, so he wrote an entire book that culminates in: The English primary sources are heavily biased, y’all need to read Scottish writings, and fuck Edward I. I loved it.

It is astoundingly dense and every other sentence is Duncan questioning and correcting the primary sources, which is amazing scholarship but also super…hard to read.

However, wow if you want a recitation of 400 years of Scottish history starting with, literally, some of the first writings to come out of Scotland, is this a book for you.

5/5 for being exactly what it says it is