Intellectual and Practical Education and its Patronage in the Northern Highlands in the Century after the Reformation

Abstract

This two-part article presents a holistic approach and a comprehensive background to intellectual and practical education in the northern Highlands before the SSPCK. It underlines the way in which intellectual and technical education was experienced, consumed, but also encouraged in one culturally heterodox part of Scotland, essentially the northern Highlands, with its population of Gaels and non-Gaels, from around the Reformation until the mid-seventeenth century. The first part will investigate education through the institutional system of schools and universities as well as education abroad and the patronage of education. It demonstrates that a number of northern Highlanders fully embraced the educational opportunities presented to them by the Crown and by local agencies. As a result, State formation and the integration of the region gradually unfolded through soft power and the shaping of minds. Northern Highlanders, mainly but not solely the clan elite, exploited the educational developments of the time and fully participated in and supported the broader dynamic of education and culture but at times balked at funding it. The education in the northern Highlands presented in this article thus appears much more in flux and less antagonistic between the area and the educational structure developed by the Crown.