Scottish Past Research Articles

Professor Edward J Cowan, FRSE HonFSAScot

Professor Ted Cowan was the epitome of the all-embracing dedication to the Scottish past that the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland represents.

Murdo Fraser and History

In this essay recent developments in the leadership of the Scottish Tories are considered via Murdo Fraser's Rivals, a history of the Marquises of Montrose and Argyll. The Rivals penetrates the present by the light of a 400-year-old Scottish past.

Celebrating a Scottish past: construction, contestation and the role of government

ABSTRACTThis article explores the use of the Scottish past in the production and promotion of official national celebrations in contemporary Scotland. Through the examination of the devolved Scottish Government’s role in the creation of Themed Years and related staged events, this article reveals a political and economic desire to use the country’s diasporic heritage to promote an international profile independent from the United Kingdom, and to capitalize on the lucrative global tourist market. However, the Scottish Government’s reliance on the economic value of Scotland’s diaspora heritage leads to an uncomfortable tension between this and the brand of civic nationalism the Government is eager to promote. Finally, through close examination of government-orchestrated heritage events during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, this article reveals how specific narratives of the Scottish past were contested by heritage consumers and the rival political agenda of the United Kingdom Government.

Highlanders and Maritimers in Alistair MacLeod’s “Clearances”

This paper examines how Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, in his latest short story entitled “Clearances”, attempts to reconnect the twentieth-century maritime culture of Cape Breton, Canada, to an idealized Scottish past that dates back to the eighteenth-century clearances of the Highlands. Along with No Great Mischief, the only novel he published in his lifetime, his short stories tackle the themes of displacement, forced migration and collective memory. After focusing on the role played by the Atlantic Ocean in his short stories as a reminder of historical and cultural displacement, this study will explore how MacLeod’s “Clearances” reconstructs a forgotten line of filiation between Cape Breton and the Highlands that sends characters and readers back and forth in time. MacLeod’s purpose to emphasize the prime importance of local culture is twofold: his stories not only serve to resist oblivion, they also express a refusal to surrender to the powerful pressures of a present-day process of globalization that challenges and threatens the survival of local identities.

Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution by Joseph S. Moore

Reviewed by: Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution by Joseph S. Moore Ned Landsman (bio) Slavery, Antislavery, U.S. Constitution, Presbyterians, Christianity, Covenanters Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. By Joseph S. Moore. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 223. Cloth, $29.95.) Founding Sins, by Joseph S. Moore, looks at the American outgrowths of Scotland's covenanting sects, those Presbyterians who split off from the established Church of Scotland and adhered to Scotland's seventeenth-century national covenants—the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant with England five years later. In those documents, Scots Presbyterians committed themselves to maintain the true religion at home and to reform the Church of England according to "the example of the best Reformed Churches." Most Scots would eventually abandon those commitments either at the Restoration or the "Glorious" Revolution. But a remnant retained their commitment to the documents and to the ideal of a Christian and Presbyterian state, suffering imprisonment, exile, and executions under the later Stuarts, and [End Page 387] remaining aloof as their fellow but uncovenanted Presbyterians regained control of the Scottish Kirk at the Revolution. In recent years, several Scottish historians have given renewed attention to the later covenanters and the political traditions they inspired. That has not, until now, been accompanied by much discussion of their co-religionists in North America. To be sure, Gideon Mailer has recently explored links between the covenanting heritage and the political principles of one of America's Revolutionaries, John Witherspoon, and others have noted also the adoption of the terminology of "Solemn League and Covenants" by Massachusetts radicals. But neither Witherspoon nor the Massachusetts men followed the covenanters's literal insistence on the renewing of the covenants. Witherspoon in fact was a minister of the established Scottish Kirk against which the covenanters testified. That neglect is not all that surprising. Covenanters were a collection of small sects, whose insistence on the necessity of state integration with the Church would seem to have been out of step with American views of religious liberty. Moreover, their commitment to upholding a very precise version of the Scottish past, one that happened long before and far away, kept their numbers low. Thus Moore has undertaken a substantial task for himself in not only recovering the story of those small groups but in insisting on their significance, as the "most important religious sect in American history that no one remembers today" (36). He succeeds surprisingly well in both telling and selling their story. Among Moore's targets are current claims by the Christian right that America was established as a Christian nation, by founders supporting its subordination to a Christian God. Moore follows recent historians such as John Fea in discrediting such an ahistorical notion of what the founders actually thought they were about. Moore goes farther. Not only were the Founders not devoted to establishing a Christian nation, but their most fervent opponents were orthodox and conservative Christians who recognized that and castigated the new American government for having been created in sin. Indeed, some went so far as to denounce the legacy of the founders for their omission, including George Washington, with whom some of them clashed as well over his western land claims. If many historians today would condemn the covenanters for such intolerance, they would be more sympathetic to covenanters' views of what they came to see as the other of the original sins of the Constitution: its acceptance of slavery. At a time when other conservative Christians were employing biblical literalism to justify slavery, covenanters followed [End Page 388] the same path to a different result. Yes, slavery was to be found in scripture, but so also were condemnations of man-stealing, hereditary punishments, and the like. Unless Christians could find evidence in the bible that either they or the slavery they practiced were the direct descendants of biblical slaveholders, covenanters contended, they had no warrant to hold slaves. And the differences they discovered were legion, from the planter's adoption of a lavish lifestyle to the absence of a...

‘Simply to amuse the reader’: The humor of Walter Scott’s Reformation

Two linked medievalist novels by Scott, The Monastery and The Abbot (1820), approach the sacred subject of Scottish Reformation with a humor that challenges the standard popular treatment by John Knox. Reworking the comic strategies of narrative framing, perspective and parallelism used earlier in Waverley (1814) and The Antiquary (1816), Scott ‘amuses’ (distracts/diverts) readers from the search for a single ‘truth voice’ in the history of the Reformation. Rather, he offers a comic perception of the self-interest, partiality and reductionism in both confessional and antiquarian responses, so making room for multiple and conflicted connections with the medieval Scottish past.

Clans and clashes : Heritage and authenticity in Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief

This paper proposes to show how Alistair MacLeod re-imagines Scottish history with a view to promoting Gaelic culture and language in contemporary Canada. In his novel No Great Mischief (1999), the reconstruction of the lineage that bridges the gap between a culturally unifying Scottish past and a dislocating Canadian present shapes the writer’s definition of authenticity which stems from feelings of loss and the need to connect the present to a mythical past and to forgotten traditions. This paper also explains how authenticity and impressions of déjà vu which echo the past in the present become forms of cultural resistance against former Canadian policies which favoured uniformity for the sole purpose of gathering distinct communities into a nation.

Sir Walter's Palimpsests: Material Imprints and the Trace of the Past

In the critical tradition, Sir Walter Scott emerges not solely as the originator of a romanticized Scottish national past, but as the ideological center of the newly forged British national identity. However, the privilege of Romantic and Enlightenment historiographies is more complex in Scott, as he engages in a critical dialogue with both. The author reads this dialogue in terms of the century's dominant metaphor for history – the palimpsest. For Scott, the metaphor of the palimpsest becomes a formal structuring principle through his use of multiple narrators to relate historical events. Scott's narratives rely on complex editorial apparati and the use of paratexts – fictional footnotes, documentary evidence, proems and epigraphs. The editorial apparati at work unveil both his hyper-reflexive attittude towards the ability to fully represent the past, which is essentially beyond reference, and his critical engagement with historical documents and memories. To help revive Scott as more than an ideological dead center, this essay argues that the palimpsestic form of Scott's narrative founds and obscures Scotland's national origin.

<em>Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century</em>, edited by Frank Ferguson and James McConnel

Reviewed by: Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century Crawford Gribben (bio) Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Frank Ferguson and James McConnel; pp. 182. Dublin and Portland: Four Courts Press, 2009, £50.00, $70.00. This wide-ranging collection of twelve essays complicates the stabilities of the Victorian age in Ireland and Scotland. Its authors, many of them early career academics, consider topics as variant as tourism, agricultural technology, economics, tuberculosis, and [End Page 334] sectarian parades. A number of chapters make significant contributions to their individual fields of study. Each investigates the "cosy roseat glow of pan-Celticism" (7), and many of the finest chapters unpack aspects of the "complicated nature of Ulster-Scottish identity" (9), an identity that, Clare M. Norcio explains, inhabits a "cultural no-man's land between Irishness and Scottishness" (31). Thus the volume's editors are at pains to emphasise that "this book is not simply about varieties of Hiberno-Scottish tension," and that "dissonance is one of the central themes to emerge from this collection" (7). Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century is at its stongest when its contributors adopt the comparative approach that makes best sense of the project's objectives. Kevin James's essay on "Scotland and 'Tourist Development' in Late-Victorian Ireland" is a suggestive exploration of a theme that is increasingly recognised as important across disciplines. James's account demonstrates that national image was being formed in tourist discourse in comparative and often evaluative terms. Norcio's study of "Societies and Seminaries: Technological Exchange in Ulster Agriculture" provides a nice case study of the means by which farming in northeast Ireland was supposedly improved by those who were and those who merely believed themselves to be Scots. Andrew R. Holmes's discussion of "Irish Presbyterian Commemorations of their Scottish Past, c. 1830–1914" contextualises the complexities of one kind of identity formation in the largest Protestant denomination in the northeast and advances the conclusions of his important recent work in this area. Frank Ferguson's consideration of "'The Third Character': The Articulation of Scottish Identities in Two Irish Writers" similarly observes the tensions and opportunities provided by this juxtaposition, if not combination, of nations, literatures, and cultures. Peter Gray's investigation of "Thomas Chalmers and Irish Poverty," meanwhile, is a masterful discussion of an unjustifiably overlooked theme in nineteenth-century Irish-Scottish relations, and Patrick Maume's essay, "From Scotland's Storied Land: William McComb and Scots-Irish Presbyterian Identity," provides a thorough and insightful analysis of one of the period's most widely read representatives of this distinctive confessional and cultural tradition. Matthew Potter's essay, "The Urban Local State in Scotland and Ireland to 1900: Parallels and Contrasts," demonstrates a series of parallels that appear surprising in the context of the political differentiation that had, historically, marked these islands. Susan Kelly's "Tuberculosis Cures Used in Ireland, 1700–1950" strays outside the collection's chronological boundaries to extremely good effect, drawing especially richly on the older folkways, the influence of which lingered into and beyond the nineteenth century. Richard B. McCready's investigation of Dundee St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the second half of the nineteenth century offers a surprising account of a diaspora's construction of a national identity in exile, as well as a description of national difference within the boundaries of Scottish Catholicism. Finally, Amy O'Reilly's study of the Hibernian Society of Glasgow from 1792 to 1824, though oddly placed toward the end of the collection, neatly juxtaposes its conclusions with those of S. Karly Kehoe's "Irish Migrants and the Recruitment of Catholic Sisters in Glasgow, 1847–1878" to demonstrate the complexity of the often transreligious character of Irish institutions in Scotland and the frequent divisions between Irish and Scottish adherents within the institutions of Scottish Catholicism. Despite these and other achievements, the essays in this volume do not address the breadth of topic promised in the title. A subtitle would have clarified those [End Page 335] aspects of Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century with which the collection aimed especially to deal, and might have explained the rationale for including the final essay...

Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (review)

Reviewed by: Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 Chad May Fielding, Penny. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 235 pp. $99.00. Penny Fielding’s most recent work explores the ramifications of the eighteenth-century study of geography, which sought to unify Great Britain by mapping economic, historical, and scientific narratives across the landscape of the nation. Specifically, Fielding is interested in the intersection of this scientific project with the conceptions of place, or the local, offered by Scottish Romanticism. In her analysis, Fielding traces the ways in which Scottish Romanticism both supports and at times troubles the geographic models of the nation. This complex relationship explains the divergence of Scottish Romanticism from its English counterpart. Ultimately, Fielding argues that the unique conception of place that defines Scottish Romanticism is a product of Scotland’s unstable position within the national discourses that define Great Britain. The study begins with a description of eighteenth-century theories of geography that offered a general abstraction that could situate and explain every locality. Two models are of particular importance for Fielding’s account. The first, stadial history, the belief that all cultures advanced through four distinct economic stages, allowed for the unification of time and space. Movement across the landscape of Scotland could be understood as a movement toward earlier temporalities. At the same time, geographic surveys could serve the economic function of bringing such places into modernity. Whereas English Romanticism (most often represented by Wordsworth [End Page 502] in Fielding’s account) imagined and crafted place from the perspective of individual experience, Scottish Romanticism found itself always dealing with the tension between the local and the larger historical field of which the local was assumed to be a part. The second geographic model involves the primacy of the North in constructing a national identity for Great Britain. Eighteenth-century climate models attempted to explain cultural difference not through a vision of different cultural temporalities projected spatially across the globe, but rather through the cultural qualities produced by particular climates. Such models argued for the primacy of northern cultural values, placing Scotland in a unique position as both a possible source for British identity and as an inferior supplement to the union. Initially, Fielding turns to the poetry of Robert Burns to explore the contrast between place as the product of an experiencing subject and place as the result of an abstract mathematical mapping. As a writer linked to a specific region, Burns suggests the difficulty of positioning a locality within an overarching system. In this case, literature functions as a “discourse that destabilises Enlightenment spatiality” (70). However, despite this destabilization the two visions of place are always linked. According to Fielding, “ideas about place as something experiential or individual—ideas we might associate with Romanticism—are produced through the Enlightenment systems that they interrogate” (185). Originating in the same cultural moment, enlightenment spatiality and romanticism depend upon one another. This point is pursued further, as Fielding employs Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and Rob Roy to integrate the romantic locales that seemingly lie outside of mappable space. Rob Roy, in particular, demonstrates how locations are ultimately determined by the social practices performed within them, freeing them from the abstract space of nationalism and geography. The display of the white wand that transforms a Scottish inn from a public to private space serves as Fielding’s most direct example. However, as she suggests, it would be a mistake to view romantic and geographic space as a simple opposition. It is modernity that transforms the Scottish past into romantic spaces that can serve as both “an alternative and as a prop to modernity” (81). Of particular interest is Fielding’s comparison of the post-1745 road-building in the Highlands and James Macpherson’s publication of Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Initially the two projects seem radically opposed, the “pure romance space” of the Ossianic text is “unbounded by the socially defining features of roads” (80). However, when one considers that the market for the Ossianic hero was the modern British citizen, it becomes clear that “the tactful mourning of the departed...

Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment

This article explores the ways in which Scottish Enlightenment writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Smith, David Hume and William Robertson used the concept of ‘resentment’ as a means of understanding and, hopefully, taming the Scottish past. It argues that historical narrative was crucial to the process of analyzing the role of the passions in human relations, and that while it drew on the developing social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, it also provided a distinctive and nuanced account of the various operations of resentment that more theoretical formulations could not adequately represent.

Nostalgic Correspondence and James Boswell's Scottish Malady

The essay examines James Boswell's correspondence with his friend, John Johnston of Grange, most of which dates from the 1760s; the essay emphasizes the correspondence that transmitted Boswell's London Journal. The essay argues that these letters invoke a form of social melancholy that surrounds a mythical and absent Scottish past, and that this mythos is closely connected to midcentury rhetorics of spontaneity and sentiment. The mythos of Scotland involves a particular sort of masculinity— spontaneous, sentimental, and unproduced—which Boswell and Grange understand to be no longer available in eighteenth-century Britain, where hegemonic forms of masculinity are understood to be polished, refined, and calculated.

Presenting the Scottish Past: the Rhind Lectures for the Session 1999 - 2000, part 1

Presenting the Scottish Past: the Rhind Lectures for the Session 1999 - 2000, part 1

Unclaimed Colonies: Anglo‐Greek Identities Through the Prism of the Dilessi/Marathon Murders (1870)

This paper examines the Anglo‐Greek dialogue on Greek and British European identities following the Dilessi/Marathon Murders, a case of kidnapping and murder of three upper class Britons by Greek brigands, which became the European cause célèbre of the 1870s. It focuses on British and Greek narratives of brigandage and uses them to provide some insight into the ways both sides conceptualised modernity. The uses of the Greek, Irish and Scottish past and present in this dialogue formed a discourse in which history, imperialism and romanticism were woven altogether. This paper argues that these intertwined ideas and processes were complicit in the formation of modern British and Greek national identities.

Scottish Heritage Southern Style

During the past four decades, growing interest in Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of clan and heritage societies and a steadily increasing number of Scottish Highland games. Scottish American ethnic awareness and organization has had other, briefer, periods of popularity in our nation's history. However, the growth of Scottish cultural groups and gatherings has proved most dramatic in the late-twentieth-century South, where a unique and distinctly regional style flavors events and perceptions of Scottish origins. Today, approximately half of all Scottish American societies base their associations in the South and more than one-third of the over two hundred annual Highland games/Scottish festivals occur in the region.(1) The popularity of the Scottish-heritage movement in the South is partly due to its double celebration of a reclaimed Scottish ethnicity and its particular relationship to southern regional identity. Southern Scottish-heritage societies emphasize kinship and bill clan society activities as family reunions. Scottish Highland games in the South are more likely to have barbecue stands, fiddle competitions, and time designated for religious events. At southern games, singers perform the Scottish tune Bonnie Dundee with the Confederate lyrics Riding a Raid, reenactors combine Confederate jackets and caps with their Scottish kilts, and bagpipe band renditions of Dixie leave crowds either cheering, in tears, or both. American celebrations of Scottish heritage draw on romantic nineteenth-century interpretations of Highland manners and Scottish identity--a mythic Scottish past that in the South blends harmoniously with nostalgic visions of antebellum southern society and the Lost Cause. Celebratory and commemorative reflections on ancestral experience commonly merge historical realities, religious inheritance, and folk memories with selected (and often invented) traditions to interpret the past in a form meaningful for the present. Southerners take to the Scottish-heritage movement so well because its present form draws on parallel mythologies, rather than actual cultural continuities, that underlie the construction both Scottish and southern identifies. Both derive from perceived historical injuries, strong attachments to place and kin, and links between militarism and religious faith, and both have produced symbolic material cultures. Scottish-heritage celebration in the South offers alternative interpretations of southernness. In heritage lore, the southern experience and identity unfold in continuous tradition from Scottish culture and history, rather than from a relationship to slavery or Jim Crow. Members of the southern Scottish American community are of the generations that experienced desegregation and the reinvention of the South. By attributing southern distinctiveness to Scottish roots, a post-Civil Rights movement celebration of southernness takes on an uncontroversial, multicultural dimension focused on ethnic identity rather than race relations. Mourning the Old South's defeat or displaying the Confederate baffle flag acquires less problematic meanings in the Scottish-heritage context. The new involved in Scottish heritage is no longer just a white, Anglo southerner, but an ethnically Celtic southerner with other reasons for being different and unassailable justification for celebrating that difference. HIGHLANDISM AND THE FORGING OF IDENTITY THROUGH DEFEAT The Scottish American community celebrates a conception of Scottishness engendered largely by the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott long after the ancestors of many Scottish Americans had left Scotland. The celebrated heritage is that of one region of Scotland: the Highlands. How the Highlands came to represent the whole of Scotland is quite similar to the way in which plantation owners came to represent southerners generally. …

Usable Pasts: History and Identity in Reformation Scotland

Few of us would dispute that the Reformation was one of the key defining moments in Scottish history. Not only did it lead to a radical reshaping of Scottish self-perceptions, in effect redefining what it meant to be a Scot, but it also contributed to a self-conscious and systematic reinterpretation of the Scottish past, through which the new Protestant self-image to which the Reformation gave rise was validated and sustained. The Scots, I was once informed by a zealous student of divinity, were always really Protestants. Risible though such an assertion may seem, it is also testimony to the power of the Protestant identity fashioned by the experience of the Reformation and, more particularly, to the longevity of the usable past which was developed to sustain it. Indeed, in historiographical terms, my zealous student's crude remark is perhaps not quite so risible as it at first appears. It was probably not intended to imply that Scotland only became Scotland in 1560 and that everything that preceded that date was in effect irrelevant though, as I hope to show, this anti-historical view has behind it the considerable authority of none other than Scotland's first great Protestant patriarch, John Knox. Rather, my student's assertion seems to have been founded on the belief that the history of pre-Reformation Scotland could be read in pro to-Protestant terms, that St Columba and the Culdees in some way prefigured the sixteenth-century reformers, and that medieval Scots, in thrall to a corrupt Catholic hierarchy, were waiting with keen anticipation for the Reformation to happen. While this view too has a highly respectable ancestry, originating with the second of Scotland's great Protestant patriarchs, George Buchanan, it will be touched on only briefly in what follows. The two very different perceptions of the Reformation which I have associated with Buchanan and Knox, the one historical and the other anti-historical, do have one thing in common: that is, a sense that what happened in 1560 was inevitable and pre-ordained. This is a view of the Scottish Reformation which has persisted, in however refined, attenuated and non-theological a form, well into the modern era.1 It is

'Writing Scotland's History': Preface

was to commemorate this landmark in Scottish historical writing by exploring what some of the previous generations of Scottish historians, from the earlier Middle Ages to the twentieth century, actually did to Scottish history: in other words, to consider how they treated the nation's past, and discuss what effects their treatments actually had on that past itself. The symposium's proceedings are now published, in the form of revised versions of the papers that were delivered there.1 What the readers of this issue of the Review will have to imagine, however, is the warmth of the appreciation that the original papers received and the lively discussion to which they gave rise, both on the floor of the meeting and informally in its interstices. A day of that sort is an occasion for historians to reflect not only on the work of their predecessors but also on how we carry out our own task of understanding and interpreting the Scottish past. There was plenty of evidence of the antiquity of an unhappy tendentious tradition: back to the compilers of the Pictish king lists with their hidden agenda of stretching out the history of the Scottish kingdom for two millennia in order to defeat English pretension; and forward to the agenda of the Enlightenment historians and Sir Walter Scott, anxious to make the past either more barbarous or more picturesque than modern times. Yet tendentiousness is only a perversion of an ambition which in

Whither Scottish History? Preface

This special issue of The Scottish Historical Review publishes the five papers and the responses to them which were given at a symposium held in the University of Strathclyde in September, 1993, to launch the newly established Research Centre in Scottish History within the Department of History. The meeting was attended by virtually all the leading figures in the field of Scottish history from early medieval times to the present day, together with a large number of postgraduate students from whose ranks will come those who will take the subject forward into the next generation. The occasion was a unique one because it was the first time in recent years that medieval, early mod ern and modern specialists have come together to discuss and debate the condition of Scottish historical studies. The creation of a new centre of excellence in Scottish history gave the opportunity for the profession to take stock of the last three decades, a period when scholarly publication in Scottish history, both in terms of quality and quantity, has expanded to an unprecedented extent. The symposium, however, was essentially designed to encourage an assessment of the future: how the study of Scottish history might evolve in the next century and so build upon the achievements of the recent past. The authors of the papers which follow were all asked to consider this question for their own special periods and areas of interest and to suggest how the discipline could be sustained and further developed. Their answers recognise the renaissance in Scottish history since the 1970s as a base from which further progress can take place. In doing so, however, it is important also to be aware of the problems associated with that period of remarkable growth. Scholarly publica tion in the subject boomed but, as Alexander Grant points out for the medieval period, there was often too much concentration on the detail of what actually happened, rather than explanation, comparison and debate. Much of the achievement of the last three decades was sound and solid rather than exciting, and thus far has failed to place Scottish history firmly on the map of international historical scholarship. Perhaps this weakness, if it is one, was inevitable. There was so much myth and ignorance about the Scottish past that careful archive-based

Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller (review)

REVIEWS 85 scenes of sexual indeterminacy as those most vividly expressive of a lost principle of difference. From his libertine youth in the theatre to his sober latter days on the bench he is in search of it, but all he finds are conundrums, like Charlotte Charke playing the part of her own father Colley Cibber in The Historical Register, or Bosavern Penlez sitting in the ruins of Peter Woods's brothel bedizened with items of female underwear. Battestin scants the analysis of Fielding's reactions to these confusions (especially Penlez) because he wants to defend him from what he regards as ill-founded criticisms of weakness or caprice; in the meantime he is himself in hot pursuit of the proof of primal sin. But every crisis or inconsistency in Fielding's life is marked by blurred difference, from his difficulties with grieving to his trouble in reconciling the theory and practice of the law. Why is it, for example, that he needs so badly to weep like a woman when he wants to be impassive like a man; or why is his advocacy of a merciless system of justice contradicted by so many examples of his pity, especially towards women? The answer to these questions (assuming it could be found) would solve the mystery not of Fielding's sexual relations with his sister, but of his strangely enthusiastic reading of Clarissa, his fascination with the case of Elizabeth Canning, and his growing pessimism, which he tries to appease with reforms of the law that always fail to match his sense of injustice. Some time between 1743, when Fielding published his Senecan essay Of the Remedy ofAffliction, and 1751, when he jettisons the mie of reason in favour of mie by fear, a significant shift in his beliefs occurs which it would have been worthwhile identifying. Its results are to be seen in thefaux-naïveté of his Examples ofthe Interposition ofProvidence (1752), the strangely vehement defence of historical veracity in the Journal ( 1755), and of course in the generic as well as the doctrinal and sexual confusions ofAmelia (1751). Here I think Battestin could have expanded the insights ofTerry Castle, whose Masquerade and Civilization (1986) contains a superb chapter on the oxymoronic instabilities of gender and genre in Amelia, as well as John Bender's pathbreaking discussion of the connections between narrative structure and penology, which likewise concentrates on Fielding's last novel, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987). As it is, they share Pat Rogers's fate, and are never mentioned at all. But their absence is compounded for by a wealth of material which is generously enough arrayed outside the restrictions of Martin Battestin's favourite theory to allow all his readers to interpret Fielding in the way that suits them best. Jonathan Lamb University of Auckland James Kerr. Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ix + 142pp. James Kerr's brief study consists of a general essay on "the historical novel and the production of the past" and three chapters dealing with five Scott novels: Waverley, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Redgauntlet. Neither the underlying subject—Scott's sense of the Scottish past and the fictional strategies by which he expresses and controls his understanding of history—nor the selection of illustrative texts is especially novel, and though the individual analyses offer fresh insights , the reader must first penetrate the densely written and somewhat elliptical opening essay before these become available. The basic position taken in the course of that essay is that "the modal tensions of the Waverley novels can be traced to Scott's conflicted sense of his own historical position" (p. 9), and there is a corresponding emphasis on ideological issues throughout the succeeding chapters. 86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:1 In the first of these, devoted to Waverley, Kerr argues that Scott's first novel is a "fictive structure which permitted the projection and assimilation of a violent past" (p. 38), and the four other novels under consideration are viewed in the same valid but somewhat limiting terms. The chapter on Old Mortality thus opens with a detailed examination of the framework of...

Scottish education, past, present and future

Scottish education, past, present and future