Shining a light in dark places – Part II

Abstract

ABSTRACTUntil late in the twentieth century, Thomas Aikenhead’s trial for Blasphemy in December 1696 and his execution by hanging in 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 and disturbed the authorities sense of security; inadvertently and publicly revealing the first outward signs of an inward transformation to the foundations of thought, culture and ecclesiology within Scottish society: but a transformation not only of a small elite culture, but in the effect of the dynamic impact of new books and ideas, rippling out through a wider literate population, in which the Aikenhead affair was both symptom and unintended consequence.