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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.

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...

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 ...