Abstract
Michael Graham?s work is the first book length study of the life and unfortunate death of Edinburgh university student Thomas Aikenhead. It builds on the important article length study of Michael Hunter first published in 1992.(1) Taking the model approach of the case-study of individual heterodoxy beautifully initiated by Ginzburg?s study of Menocchio, Seaver?s exploration of the mind of Nehemiah Wallington, or more recently Hessayon?s imaginative reconstruction of the mentalite of Thomas Tany, Graham aims to place Aikenhead?s blasphemy and execution in the various legal, confessional and political contexts of late 17th-century Edinburgh.(2) The last person to be executed for blasphemy in Britain, Aikenhead was punished for articulating his educated scepticism about commonplace Protestant doctrine and convictions in the wrong places ? in the public spaces of coffee-houses and drinking dens. Since the 19th century when Macaulay?s whiggery commemorated Aikenhead as a martyr to reason, Aikenhead?s case has been a marker of the persecuting tendencies of the confessional state: a victim of bigoted priests. As Graham shows by exploring the reportage of the trial and execution in newspapers such as the Post Man and Post Boy in London, news of the brutal punishment whipped up both clergymen and the heterodox to read providential and political meaning into his death.
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