Over the decades, the Enlightenment has been many things: from a beacon of reason eroding the old regime from within to an unwitting precursor of the worst crimes of mankind. To some, it was linked to theories of modernity, while for others it decidedly was not. To some, it sprang from a broad, French, late eighteenth-century movement, to others it started in intellectual backwaters or could even be attributed to singular brilliant, radical individuals.
In his new study, Kelsey Jackson Williams decides to speak of a ‘first (Scottish) Enlightenment’. His careful and clear analysis casts as this Enlightenment’s proponents a motley and unlikely set of characters—starring medievalists such as the Innes brothers, archaeologists like Alexander Gordon, as well as early chorographers, genealogists, and literati. He finds them in an equally unlikely kind of place, at least, if we are to measure the book against an older version of a singular Anglophone, Protestant, urban Enlightenment.
A first chapter focuses on the creative context of 1680s Edinburgh, where—in particular after the Glorious Revolution of 1688—a new intellectual environment formed, which was dominated by the losers of more recent Stuart and British history. This ‘ejected intelligentsia’, Jackson Williams posits, turned to a scholarship creatively orientated towards and steeped in the Scottish past (p. x). As chapter 2 establishes, this formative moment grew out of an older north-eastern humanist tradition which smaller power hubs dotting the region—noble houses, towns such as Aberdeen and Angus as well as educational institutions—had kept alive. This longer tradition defined by Irenicism, episcopal heritage, and royalism was not eclipsed by the rampant anti-Catholicism of the 1670s and 80s. From its survival and creative potential Jackson Williams is able to cast doubt on a centre-periphery-model of the Scottish Enlightenment that overemphasizes Edinburgh.
To substantiate this argument about a first Scottish Enlightenment of historically-minded north-eastern intelligentsia out in the cold in Williamite Britain, Kelsey Williams traces a set of innovative approaches to the past, partly home-spun, partly European in their outlook. Chapter 3 and 4 explore how scholars from the 1680s onwards cast doubt on the formerly authoritative humanist Scottish history of authors such as Hector Boece or George Buchanan. Debates about tales of the origins of monarchy ensued between hard-line Anglican churchman William Lloyd, legal-scholar George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, and others in the 1680s. They were later fuelled by Irish authors predominantly in Jacobite circles in the first half of the eighteenth century and together spearheaded ‘new sceptical understandings of the past’ (p. x) more generally. Chapter 4 follows these seismic shifts in historiography into early medieval Scottish history. Tracing the scholarship of Thomas Innes from the 1690s to his Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants (1729), Williams uncovers its Jacobite, Catholic, and ecumenical agenda alongside its methodological novelty.
Chapter 5 moves towards prehistoric sites and monuments, the study of which was not new in form, but in local practice. It argues how scholars such as Alexander Gordon or John Toland turned to the physicality of historical objects as a subject of enquiry to gain new insights into Scotland’s prehistoric past. Beyond this context, Chapter 6 carefully anchors material as well as historiographical novelties in wider European debates, thoroughly Europeanizing a shift all too easily (albeit patriotically) reduced to local ingenuity. Foremost, the role of French Maurist Jean Mabillon and early proponents of diplomatics come into sight as Jackson Williams traces the first adaptions to the axiomatic 1739 publication of James Anderson’s Thesaurus.
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 case studies of further historically-orientated disciplines, but they arguably also advance very distinct angles – one local, one European, one British – of the overarching argument: while authors of works on chorography (Chapter 7) showed an active interest in geographies between the 1660s and 1790s, they often prominently engaged with new methodologies from local historical questions. Genealogy, by contrast, is placed on a track prominent elsewhere in Europe. It focuses on the waning of fable genealogies and those of single families for projects aimed at collectively defining and reifying a larger ‘Scottish’ nobility with new genealogical tools (partially imported from France). Chapter 9 shows how in ‘national’ literature—in a comparable way to what had happened with Shakespeare and Milton, but with important differences due to its origins in the Scottish-Irish Gaelic dispute—seventeenth-century canonization efforts engulfed Scottish authors, who, over time, came to be considered representative.
Chapter 10, finally, turns to reception: Jackson Williams utilizes subscription lists in particular to show that the readership of these early Enlightenment texts was neither straightforward in its political nor homogenous in its intellectual or professional outlook. Readers abounded beyond Edinburgh, outside the legal profession, and beyond Jacobite or Episcopalian circles.
The only criticism may be that the argument is not bold enough. If the only reason for calling this movement a ‘first Enlightenment’ is ‘to recognize its novelty, its participation in continent-wide changes in the way historical evidence was perceived and assessed, and its reaction to the decay of previously paradigmatic truths’ (p. 5), it is well underway decades earlier (p. 160ff). It would have been brave to sever the ties to a historiography that—even in its Trevor-Roperian incarnation—still saw this intellectual world as a ‘pre-Enlightenment’ (p. 6). In this reviewer’s opinion, it would have also been necessary given that this Scottish world of learned innovators sits squarely within comparable, local historical cultures elsewhere in Europe. Some of them are also held back by narratives that reduce them to predecessors in what Jackson Williams aptly calls a ‘strange intellectual purgatory’ (p. x).
This criticism does not take away at all from Jackson Williams’s achievement, however. He carefully casts the ‘city guard’ and ‘crowd of citizens’ of an older Enlightenment drama in new roles. This new character set inspires comparisons beyond Scotland’s north-east and it builds much-needed bridges between British and European political and intellectual histories.
