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Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not yet fully realized precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a ‘First’ Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of Early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland’s two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.

This chapter argues that the changes which took place in Scottish intellectual culture during the 1680s were not in themselves sufficient to produce this cultural moment. Instead, they interacted with and built upon the rich, long-standing cultural traditions of the north-east, ‘Scotland beyond the mountains’, which are here traced to the foundation of King’s College, Aberdeen, by Bishop William Elphinstone and the early development of a distinctively north-eastern humanist tradition. The scholars and scholarship discussed in the remainder of this book owed their intellectual and cultural world to this heady blend of Early Enlightenment intellectual ferment, revolution, and north-eastern humanism.

On 14 November 1780, David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, the radical antiquary and natural historian, invited a group of ‘noblemen and gentlemen’ to his house to discuss the formation of what was to become the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.1 The list is a long and scintillating one, including Lord Kames, Lord Hailes, James Boswell, Gilbert Stuart, and a host of other worthies. Of the thirty-seven invited, however, only fourteen attended....

This chapter interrogates the methods and motivations of a discipline often dismissed as the driest of dry and antiquarian pursuits: genealogy. It reveals that, far from being intellectually vapid, genealogical scholarship was intimately connected to the development of the Stuart state and the transmission of French textual scholarship to Scotland. It offered a proving ground for the new practices of archival research and could practically demonstrate the value of the new scholarship in a field of study whose application was widely seen to be both immediate and essential in a kin-based society.

This chapter explores national and local geographies, challenging older views of this period as a geographically impoverished caesura between the monumental achievements of the 1662 Atlas Maior and the 1791 First Statistical Account. Instead, it argues, geographical scholarship was very much alive during the Early Enlightenment, but was undergoing rapid and unpredictable change as scholars brought new methodologies and new mentalities to bear on a traditional, humanist discipline. It identifies Sir Robert Sibbald as a key figure in early Enlightenment geographical thought while also recovering the works of the forgotten geographers and antiquaries Alexander Keith and Thomas Orem.

This chapter locates the origins of the first Scottish Enlightenment in James VII and II’s patronage in 1680s Edinburgh and the psychological and social impact of the revolution of 1688 on Jacobite, Episcopalian, and Catholic scholars. It closely examines the institutional structures of learned societies, libraries, and churches, demonstrating the ways in which they shaped the agenda of subsequent writers. In doing so, it offers new readings of important moments such as the foundation of the Advocates Library and the ill-fated Catholic presence at Holyroodhouse while offering case studies in the form of the well-known polymath Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh and the more obscure scholar John Cockburn.

This chapter recovers the first major assault on Scotland’s humanist history, its myth of an Ancient Monarchy in the 1680s and the subsequent, increasingly probing challenges which were directed against it in the wake of revolution. The authority of historians such as Hector Boece and George Buchanan was no longer sufficient to protect them from challenges based upon new and more sophisticated interpretations of medieval texts. In particular, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s high-profile dispute with English and Irish scholars such as William Lloyd, Edward Stillingfleet, and Roderick O’Flaherty is identified as a turning point in the development of Scottish historiographical practice.

This chapter assesses the cultural impact of the works of scholarship discussed here. Were they read and, if so, by whom? Using subscription lists, it argues that not only were these texts widely received throughout and furth of Scotland but that their reception allows us to trace the culture of the north-east exporting its own traditions to Scotland at large in a crucial, but subsequently forgotten, moment of cultural and intellectual upheaval. This in turn is placed within the wider context of Early Enlightenment reading, within and beyond the nation. Finally, the conclusion reiterates the arguments of the book as a whole and looks towards the end of the eighteenth century and the fate of Early Enlightenment thought.

The challenges discussed in Chapter 3 culminated in Thomas Innes’s 1729 Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain, or Scotland, the subject of this chapter. Innes’s paradigm-shifting reconstruction of early medieval Scottish history, together with the final rejection of humanist history which it required, still underpins modern understandings of the period. Innes’s own methods and goals, however, were more complex than mere seeking after truth and this chapter interrogates his Jacobite and Catholic, but surprisingly ecumenical agenda as well as tracing the immediate and longer-term fortunes of his theories.

This chapter highlights the foundational role of the French textual scholar Jean Mabillon in setting the agenda for the study of medieval Scotland in the archive during the same period. From the first adoption of Mabillon’s methods by Scottish scholars to the triumphant 1739 publication of James Anderson’s Thesaurus—a Scottish response to Mabillon’s De re diplomatica—these methodologies went from being peripheral to axiomatic in Scottish historical studies, fundamentally transforming scholars’ engagement with the archive and its documents. Key figures discussed include, as well as Anderson, the historians Patrick Abercromby and Robert Keith and the forger and archival scholar Marianus Brockie.

This chapter turns towards artefacts, tracing the sudden rise in interest in prehistoric sites and monuments across Scotland during this period. It shows that cutting-edge approaches to the study of material as diverse as Roman forts and ancient megaliths could interact with older syncretist theories of knowledge and human origins to produce surprising, sometimes radical, reinterpretations of the distant past. Archaeologists and writers as diverse as the opera singer-turned-antiquary Alexander Gordon and the freethinker John Toland used these ancient monuments as telescopes through which to glimpse an almost unimaginable antiquity, one which could exert a dramatically destabilizing effect on present-day hierarchies of culture and geography.

The Early Enlightenment was, in many ways, a time of reckoning and wrestling with Scotland’s humanist past and this was no different for those Scots attempting to build, rebuild, or deconstruct their nation’s literary heritage. This chapter explores a series of canon-building efforts during this period, all growing out of the much older dispute between Scottish and Irish scholars over their shared Gaelic heritage, but all also partaking of new, Enlightened forms of literary scholarship and textual editing to create a distinctive canon of Scottish writers. Key figures discussed include Robert Freebairn, Thomas Ruddiman, Robert Sibbald, and Pierre Bayle.

In the summer of 1699 James Stevenson received an unexpected visitor. Stevenson had been keeper of the Advocates Library, late seventeenth-century Edinburgh’s centre for legal and historical scholarship, since 1693 but now he found himself in the role of novice instead of master. Over two June afternoons his guest, one ‘Mr. Fleming’, taught Stevenson how to date medieval handwriting and even examined many of the library’s manuscripts himself, determining their ages and correcting the descriptions made by Stevenson and his predecessor James Nasmyth. A few days later the stranger had vanished from Edinburgh, leaving Stevenson with only a baffled recollection of an unusually erudite ‘foraign travelled man’....

Peter Burke continues to address wide-ranging issues in the history of knowledge in his latest book, beginning with the bold starting point that ‘[o]ne of the principal aims of this study is to des...

Antiquarianism, the early modern study of the past, occupies a central role in modern studies of humanist and post-humanist scholarship. Its relationship to modern disciplines such as archaeology is widely acknowledged, and at least some antiquaries—such as John Aubrey, William Camden, and William Dugdale—are well-known to Anglophone historians. But what was antiquarianism and how can twenty-first century scholars begin to make sense of it? To answer these questions, the article begins with a survey of recent scholarship, outlining how our understanding of antiquarianism has developed since the ground-breaking work of Arnaldo Momigliano in the mid-twentieth century. It then explores the definition and scope of antiquarian practice through close attention to contemporaneous accounts and actors’ categories before turning to three case-studies of antiquaries in Denmark, Scotland, and England. By way of conclusion, it develops a series of propositions for reassessing our understanding of antiquarianism. It reaffirms antiquarianism’s central role in the learned culture of the early modern world and offers suggestions for avenues which might be taken in future research on the discipline.

Ars longa, vita brevis – ‘art is long, life short’. The methods by which scholars have attempted to circumvent this seemingly insurmountable contradiction, first posed by Hippocrates of Cos in the ...

John Aubrey (1626-1697) is well-known for his contributions to the intellectual life of the early Royal Society, prehistoric archaeology in Britain, and other scientific and antiquarian disciplines.1 His education, however, has been comparatively neglected. Since Anthony Powell's 1948 biography, there has been no full-scale study of the young Aubrey within his scholarly contexts.2 Historically, there existed a perception of Aubrey as a dilettante, an amateur with superficial knowledge of many subjects but who lacked the will, or the ability, to become master of any.3 While that tradition has been exploded by the work of Kate Bennett, Michael Hunter, Rhodri Lewis, and William Poole, more recent studies have focused on Aubrey's major scholarship, rather than its educational underpinnings.4 This paper explores those underpinnings by reconstructing his intellectual development up to his election to the Royal Society in 1663. Building on studies of university education, scientific culture, and the origins of the Royal Society by Mordechai Feingold, Robert G. Frank, Jr., Michael Hunter, and Charles Webster, it establishes a more nuanced intellectual biography and places his education within its larger context.5 Attending to the familial, social, and scholarly networks in which he moved by virtue of his class, his education, and his residence, it situates him within the contexts of Early Modern English scientific and antiquarian scholarship and amends prior assessments of the extent and nature of his education. In doing so it paints a portrait of Aubrey at the inception of his major research projects and encourages a reassessment of his approaches and contributions to individual disciplines. It also delineates the social and scholarly circles within which he moved in Civil War-era Oxford and Commonwealth London, networks that played significant roles in the foundation of the Royal Society and the conduct of scholarship in Restoration England.Wiltshire and SchoolAubrey was born at Lower Easton Pierse (now Easton Piercy) in northern Wiltshire, on 12 March 1626.6 He was the eldest child of his parents, Richard and Deborah (Lyte) Aubrey. On his father's side, he was the great-grandson of the lawyer, MP, and confidant of Queen Elizabeth, William Aubrey, and cousin to Sir John Danvers the Regicide.7 However, his grandfather Aubrey was a younger son and his father, though owning land in several counties, possessed only moderately substantial means when he married Deborah, daughter and heir of Isaac Lyte of Easton Pierse. Deborah Lyte's family were of more modest background than her husband's: yeomen and small gentry whose estates were grouped around the village of Kington St Michael, a few minutes walk from Easton Pierse.8 The farm of Broad Chalke in south Wiltshire, where Aubrey spent much of his early life, had been leased by the Brownes, Deborah's mother's family, from the Earls of Pembroke and by 1640 this lease had passed from Aubrey's great-uncle to his father.9Aubrey was born into that class of gentry who could boast of ancient descent and who had cousins in positions of wealth and power, but whose own resources were more limited. Richard Aubrey's will disposed of substantial landed property in Wiltshire, Herefordshire, and Wales, but, by his son's account, also lefthis estate encumbered with £1,800 in debt.10 Aubrey's affluence was precarious, and would gradually crumble during the course of his adult life.During his childhood, Aubrey was plagued with illness, including a potentially fatal fever and a 'sicknesse of vomiting' that lasted until he was sent to school, aged twelve.11 This may partly be responsible for the fragmentary formal schooling he was given prior to his matriculation at Oxford. In 1634, he began to study Latin grammar under Robert Latimer, rector of Leigh Delamere, near Easton Pierse, but Latimer died soon after and the young Aubrey was given over to a succession of 'dull ignorant rest-in-house teachers' before finally being sent to Blandford School in Dorset, and the care of William Sutton. …