Shining a light in dark places – Part I

Abstract

ABSTRACTUntil late in the twentieth century, Thomas Aikenhead’s trial for Blasphemy in Edinburgh, December 1696 and his execution on 8 January 1697 served a limited historical purpose, providing a lurid footnote to the unenlightened nature of Scotland’s seventeenth-century history, and the fanatical disposition of its Covenanting traditions. The Aikenhead affair however, was no footnote to Scotland’s intellectual history, nor solely a bleak insight into Scottish society’s scarcely unique but nevertheless brutal religious intolerance. The Aikenhead case illuminates a transformational moment in Scotland’s cultural history, when radical new philosophical, scientific, theological, social and political ideas and methods challenged received wisdom, confronted pervasive and deeply held beliefs, and disturbed the authorities sense of security, inadvertently and publicly revealing the first outward signs of an inward change to the foundations of thought, culture and ecclesiology within Scottish society: a transformation that was fiercely resisted, yet applied not only to a small elite culture, but through the effect of the dynamic impact of new books and ideas, rippled out through a wider literate population, in which the Aikenhead affair was both symptom and unintended consequence.