1560 is a crucial date in the development of Scottish education, for it was in this year that the First Book of Discipline set out its ambitious project of providing a school in every notable town. This book, the result of exhaustive archival research and extensive use of the Registers of Deeds (which offer evidence of schoolmasters so described, as witnesses to legal documents), provides an indepth and wide-ranging analysis of education during the period, considered in its full religious, social and cultural setting. The curriculum receives particular attention, with its emphasis on music drawn out. The volume also presents a list of all identified Scottish schools and schoolmasters from the Protestant Reformation down to 1633.

The late Dr John Durkan (1914-2006), historian and schoolmaster and a co-founder of the Innes Review, left a published legacy of hundreds of articles on Scottish intellectual and religious life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and helped change the face of Scottish historiography. He was latterly a Senior Honorary Research Fellow of his alma mater, Glasgow University