The malleable Macbeth: Understanding the evolving image of an obscure medieval king

This thesis investigates the changing historical perceptions of the Scottish king Macbeth (r. 1040--1057) in relation to the development of Scotland's constitutional identity between 1000 and 2000 A.D. Macbeth's historiographical transformation from a fairly ordinary king in the eleventh century to a usurping tyrant during the later medieval and Enlightenment periods, and then to a peaceful prince and nationalist hero in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the result of successive generations of historians reinterpreting their country's history in order to justify the political ideologies of their contemporary communities. This metamorphosis not only demonstrates history writing's susceptibility to political forces, as well as how the myth of Macbeth has changed over time, but provides for us a comprehensive and linear, one-thousand-year example of the way in which Scotland's self-perception as a distinct nation has adapted according to the modernizing political process. Some of the writers included in this study are Marianus Scottus, John of Fordun, Andrew Wyntoun, Hector Boece, David Hume, Walter Scott, C. C. Stopes, Ruaraidh Erskine and Nick Aitchison.