The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth Century Britain, Ireland and America

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Richard B. Sher's articles and books have attracted the attention of historians who work beyond those fields usually associated with the transatlantic spread of Enlightenment ideas and institutions. Sher's first book, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (1985) remains an influential study of the dynamic relationship between philosophical concepts and the formation of social institutions. As a social history of ideas, it serves as an invigorating approach to neglected sources (both published and unpublished), its attention to the private and public lives of ‘minor’ as well as ‘major’ historical figures, and its unusually careful consideration of literary reception as well as publication. Together, this inclusive methodology has enabled Sher to devote his career to defining the contemporary meanings of the Scottish Enlightenment as a social, commercial, and intellectual phenomenon. Sher's extensive new study provides a pioneering examination of the interplay among the social relationships, material conditions, and cultural contexts that enabled the Scottish Enlightenment to emerge as the defining literary phenomenon of the mid- to late-eighteenth century—on both sides of the Scottish Borders, Irish Sea, and Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, this book is a weighty but subtle intervention in the current proliferation of books on material culture and the history of print. Sher has refined his inclusive methodology to develop new insights about the dynamic nature or, as he calls it, the ‘problem’, of complex relationships among people and their evolving professions, as well as their ‘enlightened’ ideas. This approach to the history of the Enlightenment in Britain raises important questions regarding the more narrowly-focused studies that have speedily assumed canonical status in the blossoming field of Book History.