The introduction sets out the book’s thesis that the conspicuous absence of Scotland as a named nation from the great poetry and political writing of Elizabeth’s reign is not an indication of that kingdom’s actual insignificance in sixteenth-century English consciousness, but the effect of myriad acts of imagination that signal quite the opposite. The conscious project of English insular imagining was to make Scotland-as-nation inconceivable; to produce, by various means, the image of an England stretching from shore to shore, a trompe l’oeil vision of England and Wales as Britain, with Scotland intermittently forcing itself on English consciousness as a foreign supplement, an ever-erupting ‘border region’ threatening England’s peace.