Williams, Kelsey Jackson. The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests, and History

Abstract

“Enlightenment” in the title of this book is a bit misleading, if it suggests an early foretaste of David Hume and Adam Smith. Late in the book, however, Jackson Williams describes his subject as the “Antiquarian Enlightenment,” leading the reader to wonder if that might have been a more accurate title—but perhaps one the publisher found insufficiently sexy. The enlightenment under discussion is, in fact, the new awareness of archival sources and material culture that emerged in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Scotland, primarily among its “minority confessions” (Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Jacobites), which rejected the humanist histories of writers like George Buchanan, who had served the agenda of Protestant reformers and critics of divine-right monarchy.Jackson Williams’s Scottish rebels, priests, and scholars were engaged in the same kind of endeavour as their brethren in the Society of Antiquaries of London and precursors like John Evelyn. While there were some points of contact with England, these Scots were more connected to continental scholarship, with its new emphasis on archival sources, partly through the network of Scots colleges and abbeys in Europe. Unlike the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment we usually think of, they were not concentrated in Edinburgh but instead in the northeast of the country, centered on Aberdeen but also dependent on the great country houses of the region, which acted as hubs for culture and learning.Primary sources were deployed in rewriting conventional historical narrative like the Stuart dynastic myth of an unbroken line of 111 monarchs stretching back from James VII to the Dalriadic king Fergus mac Fearchar, a supposed contemporary of Alexander the Great. Mostly fanciful portraits of these kings were commissioned for the gallery of Holyroodhouse on the eve of the Revolution of 1688, an assertion of dynastic legitimacy just as their historicity was beginning to be challenged. Ironically it was a Jacobite, Father Thomas Innes, who exposed the fiction in his Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain (1729). Innes’s target was not the Stuarts (for whom he established what he thought was a more reliable pedigree from the Pictish kings of the fifth century of the Common Era) but the humanist historians who used the Dalriadic myth as proof that Scottish monarchy had been elective and frequently challenged, the Scottish church governed historically by presbyters not bishops. Innes may have been a Jacobite polemicist and his royal genealogy as dubious as the one he exploded, but at least his methodology was more solid. Jackson Williams suggests the debunking of the Ancient Monarchy myth was “the single greatest shift in Scottish historical thought, in the eighteenth century or at any other time.” Archival research and “the minute analysis of texts” were also used to confirm the legitimacy of Robert III, which had been questioned by opponents of hereditary Stuart rule.When a group of second Enlightenment Scots met in Edinburgh to found the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780, they acknowledged but largely discounted the first wave who had preceded them. Even so, the earlier generation’s “conception of historical scholarship was carried forward well into the nineteenth century and beyond, even when they themselves had been forgotten.” Some of the book’s chapters go into more detail about academic controversies than most general readers will care about, but Jackson Williams’ prose is lively and he uses case studies to document the flowering of a new evidence-based approach to history. In the process, he rescues a fascinating and important intellectual movement from neglect and the teleology of Whig historiography.