Jackson Williams’s book ends with the foundation of our sister society, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in 1780. The author demonstrates in the preceding chapters that this Enlightenment body owed much to an earlier enlightenment in the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries. While the Scottish Antiquaries of 1780 acknowledged this ‘bright Constellation of Caledonian Naturalists and Antiquaries, which adorned the end of the last century, and continued to illuminate the beginning of this’, they largely ignored its achievements. Those earlier antiquaries were suspect for their politics (often Jacobite) and religious confession (usually Episcopalian or Roman Catholic), which put them at odds with the Edinburgh of David Hume and Adam Smith.

As the author shows, the earlier enlightenment laid important foundations by reassessing Scottish history based on its material and documentary remains, from which their successor Antiquaries benefited. Jackson Williams’s rebels and priests were engaged in the same exercise as their counterparts in England, and there was some contact between the Scots and our Society and its precursors. Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, one of the founders of the library of the Society of Advocates in Edinburgh, debated the authenticity of early Scottish histories with John Evelyn, and Sir John Clerk of Penicuik was a friend of William Stukeley. While Penicuik has been seen as ‘a representative example of the Enlightened Scottish antiquary’, he was in fact outside the mainstream of antiquarian currents in Scotland, as a Whig and a Unionist.

The mainstream was, as mentioned, more Jacobite and less Church of Scotland. Jackson Williams emphasises the origins of the first Scottish Enlightenment in Aberdeen and the northeast part of the country, rather than in Edinburgh. Aberdeen, with its strong Episcopal tradition and two universities, along with the great houses of the region, provided a hub for culture and learning. The north-east also served as a jumping-off point for the Scots colleges and abbeys on the continent. There, Scottish scholars were exposed to new methods of textual analysis, notably by the Benedictine Jean Mabillon. Like their continental counterparts, Scottish antiquaries turned to the close examination of primary sources, rejecting the ‘humanist’ historiography of writers like George Buchanan. They studied archival material, heraldry and genealogy, Scots literature, topography and the material remains of the past (megaliths, notably).

For Jackson Williams, ‘the single greatest shift in Scottish historical thought, in the eighteenth century or any other time’, was the rejection of the ‘Ancient Monarchy’ myth, which asserted that James vii was descended from a line of 111 kings stretching back to Fergus mac Fearchar, a supposed contemporary of Alexander the Great. This mythical pedigree was deployed by Stuart propagandists in a series of fanciful portraits installed at Holyrood House in 1688 (on the eve of revolution), but subsequently shown by Father Thomas Innes to be mostly fabricated. Innes was by no means an enemy of the Stuart dynasty (he was a committed Jacobite), but he wanted its claims to legitimacy to be based on a solid evidentiary footing. His real target was the humanist historiography that used the Ancient Monarchy myth to show that royal rule in Scotland had frequently been challenged. It was important for Innes to show, for example, that the eleventh-century chronicler Veremund and his writings were fabricated in order to provide historical justification for the overthrow of James iii in 1488. Innes also used primary sources to dispute the claim that the Scottish church had been governed in the distant past by presbyters, not bishops. Ironically, the royal descent that Innes traced in archival sources back to the Pictish kings of the fifth century of the Common Era was about as bogus as the one he exploded, but at least his methodology was on the right track. The new textual scholarship also established the legitimacy of Robert iii, whose alleged bastardy had been used to undermine the Stuarts’ claim of uninterrupted hereditary succession.

There is much detail in The First Scottish Enlightenment, but the narrative is not overburdened by it and the author’s prose style is engaging. The book as a whole brings an important intellectual movement out of the shadows of previous neglect. It also reminds us that the story of English antiquaries (and Antiquaries) was not without parallels in Scotland and on the European continent.