Fighting with Canon

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.

Conclusion

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....

Pedigrees and Proof

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.

Scotland Illustrated

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.

Enlightenment in the Archive

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.

Thomas Innes

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.

The Fall of the Ancient Monarchy

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.

Such Honourable and Worthy Persons

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.

Introduction

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’....

Stupendous Fabricks

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.