From Peter Marshall, winner of the Wolfson Prize 2018, Storm’s Edge is a new history of the Orkney Islands that dives deep into island politics, the evolution of folklore, and community memory on the geographical edge of Britain.
Peter Marshall was born in Orkney, his ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday – where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. Merging his local experience with wider historical expertise, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.
With Orkney as our point of departure, Marshall traverses three centuries of dramatic religious, political and economic upheaval; a time during which what we think of as modern Scotland, and then modern Britain, was being forged and tested.
What happens to our understanding of Scotland and Britain when they are viewed from the perspective of their island edge?
Peter Marshall is a Scottish historian and academic who was born and raised in the Orkney Islands. He is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Marshall won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize in 2018 for his book Heretics and Believers.