Laura A.M. Stewart is senior lecturer in early modern British history at Birkbeck, University of London. After completing her PhD at Edinburgh University (2003), she was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2005). Her first book, Urban Politics and the British Civil Wars: Edinburgh, 1617-53 was published in 2006. She has published widely on seventeenth-century Scottish history in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and will soon complete a new textbook, covering the period 1625-1750, for the Edinburgh University Press series The New History of Scotland. This is her second book.