Scottish Tradition Research Articles

Rev. William Matheson and the Performance of Scottish Gaelic ‘Strophic’ Verse

The late Rev. William Matheson's lifelong fascination with the performance of Gaelic songs in so-called 'strophic' metres ultimately resulted in his recording seventeen such songs for the album Gaelic Bards and Minstrels, No. 16 in the Scottish Tradition series of recordings from the School of Scottish Studies Archive. Strophic metre, used largely for clan eulogy, elegy, and other praise-poetry in the period after the decline of the syllabic metres, is remarkable in that the final line of each stanza contrasts metrically and ornamentally with all of the preceding lines in that stanza. This article examines Matheson's sources, methodology, and performance; evaluates his rationale; and assesses the likely authenticity of his performances of six songs in which the number of lines varies from one stanza to the next.

United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution) ed. by Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, and: Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press by Rhona Brown, and: The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766–1816) ed. by Jennifer Orr

Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, eds. United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution). No. I. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 272. $99. Rhona Brown. Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press. Famham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 280. $134.95. Jennifer Orr, ed. The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766-1816). Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Pp. 242. $70. Over the last two decades there has been been a serious readjustment of Romantic studies away from anglo-centrism towards a more view of relations between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This archipelagic turn, if I may add another methodological twist to recent scholarly tergiversations, has been propelled by a growing awareness about varieties of nationalism in our own time. Among the landmarks in this process are Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1998), Ina Ferris's The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002), Ian Duncan's Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), and Murray Pittock's Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008); the list could go on. All these books are important contributions in different ways, but each of them has wrestled with the recognition that if the Romantic period saw the idea of nation emerging into a recognizable modern sense, that sense does not map easily onto the complications and irregularities of the cultural experience of the time. Pittock, for instance, is committed to the idea of Irish and Scottish traditions as distinct from an English Romanticism identified with literary London and its provincial others (most obviously in the Lake District), but he is also committed to a sense of irreducible relatedness in Irish and Scottish traditions. The term archipelagic, first drafted into use in Renaissance studies, usefully signals the interculturalism of what otherwise might too readily be constituted as national traditions, acknowledging also that the very word tradition may too readily imply an originally evolving autonomous entity. It might be added, of course, that the roles of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh, not to mention the regional English, for instance, in literary London warrant further study. Going to the great wen was not always an act of disaffiliation. It is instructive, for instance, how many Scots were involved in the London radical movement of the 1790s, as the historian Bob Harris has shown. They include Robert Watson (some-time secretary to Lord George Gordon), Robert Thomson (radical songwriter and brother to the eminently respectable George Thomson, editor of Burns), both of whom fled to France in the 1790s, and the founder of the London Corresponding Society itself, Thomas Hardy. None of these abandoned their Scottish interests in order to concentrate on London or even global radicalism. Indeed after the LCS had been driven underground, Hardy became a major figure in the setting up of the William Wallace Society, while Watson, by this time styling himself the Chevalier Watson, brought the Stuart papers back to Britain from Rome. Hardy played a major role in helping Thomson and Watson set themselves up when they returned to London after the defeat of Napoleon, visiting Watson to see the Stuart papers, and helping Thomson with the application to the Literary Fund and with the publication of a sadly execrable poem on Wallace. A sense of the complexity of these literary relations between the four nations characterizes each of the three volumes covered by this review. Rhona Brown's excellent study of Robert Fergusson aims to rescue him from being seen simply as John the Baptist to the Christ of Robert Burns (to use a formulation of Robert Crawford's). Previous studies have tended to discount Fergusson's English poetry in favor of the presumed authenticity of the Scottish vernacular poetry. Brown does valuable work in showing the diversity of resources on which Fergusson drew for the volume he produced before his death at the early age of 24. …

Scotland's Migrant Philosophers and the History of Scottish Philosophy

SummaryThe history of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century is written by migrant philosophers attempting to use the Scottish tradition as the foundation for philosophy in their new homelands. In the accounts of John Clark Murray (Canada), James McCosh (the United States) and Henry Laurie (Australia), different evaluations are made of the continuing relevance of the Scottish Common Sense School, but all are committed Christians for whom David Hume cannot be part of a Scottish tradition. As a result, none of these accounts gives any suggestion of there having been a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. That concept was only made possible by the radical reinterpretation of Hume by Norman Kemp Smith, which linked his philosophy to Hutcheson and dismissed his opposition to Reid. The subsequent emergence of ‘the Scottish Enlightenment’ eclipsed nineteenth-century Scottish ‘idealism’, shaped by Edward Caird, which Murray, Laurie and Kemp Smith had regarded as the foundation of their own philosophies.

A European Experience in the South: Eric Voegelin, the Southern Agrarians and Common Sense Philosophy

The purpose of this research paper is twofold. First to examine Eric Voegelin’s treatment of common sense philosophy, especially its role in the foundation of an innovative political science. In this context, Voegelin’s formative years in the United States and his early reflexions on the “intellectual formation” of the American society, discussed in the book On The Form of the American Mind, will also be considered. Secondly, I will link Voegelin’s analysis of common sense philosophy to the Southern Agrarian tradition. Voegelin had a strong connection with the South and, even if he was not a southerner, his years in Baton Rouge were one of the most significant periods for his philosophical speculation and the acquaintances he made. I will demonstrate the Agrarian perspective to common sense philosophy. The argument is not that Southern Agrarian conservatism can be likened to the Scottish common sense tradition. I do not want to claim historical continuity. It is only that Scottish common sense and Southern Agrarianism (via antebellum intellectuals), distinct as they are, are movements that have some similarities. In particular, I intend to focus upon the Agrarians’ perspective about literature and the philosophical import of literature considering its crucial importance in helping to address the crises of modern political, social and spiritual order.

James Arbuckle's Glotta (1721) and the Poetry of Allusion

James Arbuckle's Glotta (1721) is a topographical poem about the River Clyde, which also examines Scottish culture in post-Union ‘Britain’. It is a conscious exercise in a tradition of allusive poetry, the allusions ranging from Pope's Windsor-Forest and Denham's Cooper's Hill to a Scottish poetic tradition that includes the sixteenth-century humanist George Buchanan and Arbuckle's contemporary (and friend) Allan Ramsay. Pope's Tory celebration of Stuart culture is married to the ‘ultra-Whig’ Buchanan to celebrate the new Hanoverian ‘Britain’ as the source of Scottish ‘enlightenment’. This article explores these issues through a detailed analysis of Arbuckle's allusions and their historical context.

Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network: the first 15 years (1993–2008)

The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) was established in 1993. One of the first national programmes of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, it has played a lead role internationally in many of the developments in guideline methodology. The challenges faced from the beginning of the organisation up to its integration into the National Health Service and how they were addressed are set out and related to SIGN's contribution to the Scottish tradition of medical education.

Malthus's idea of a moral and political science

This paper discusses, first, the kind of Newtonian methodology Malthus had been exposed to at Cambridge; secondly, the views on algebra and the doctrine of proportions he inherited from MacLaurin and the contribution of his colleague Bewick Bewin in devising a special role for this doctrine in the moral sciences; thirdly, Malthus's ideas on language and the reasons for rejection of an artificial language for political economy. Then it discusses his idea of political economy as a moral science and his claims to be Adam Smith's true heir. The conclusion is that Hollander is right when he contends that Malthus's and Ricardo's methods, as contrasted with their methodologies, were just two opposite poles within one spectrum, but also that the Cantabrigian and Scottish tradition provided staple for a design of a moral and political science alternative to the Unitarian and the Benthamite programs.

Scottish Historical Archaeology: International Agendas and Local Politics

Historical archaeology as practiced in Scotland is divergent from the mainstream tradition of historical archaeology/post-medieval archaeology that dominates North America and the English-speaking world. Cultural and historical forces have shaped an historical archaeology with a deeper time depth, which extends back into the Middle Ages. It also focuses on different subjects reflecting the political concerns associated with Scottish national identity. Examples drawn from Glasgow’s history are used to illustrate the distinctiveness of the Scottish tradition and how it is evolving. I argue that one of its strengths of Scottish historical archaeology is that it provides a corrective contrast to the subjects and approaches which dominate historical archaeology in the English-speaking world.

A Scottish Jacobin: John Oswald on Commerce and Citizenship

John Oswald was a Scottish journalist and pamphleteer who gained fame in the 1790s for his scandalous lifestyle and democratic political views. He was considered by his British contemporaries as the incarnation of the crimes of Jacobinism. This article seeks to reassess Oswald’s place in the history of political thought by placing him within the context of his own Scottish background. Oswald’s radical views were neither directly inspired by his French revolutionary friends, nor typical of the English and Scottish radical scenes. Rather, Oswald is better understood as a paradoxical heir to a mixed Scottish tradition of civic virtue and historical analysis of commercial society.

Catalyst of Change: John Guthrie Kerr and the Adaptation of an Indigenous Scottish Tradition

Catalyst of Change: John Guthrie Kerr and the Adaptation of an Indigenous Scottish Tradition

Victor Cousin and the Scottish Philosophers

Exchanges in the nineteenth century between Sir William Hamilton, James Frederick Ferrier and the French philosopher Victor Cousin are crucial to understanding contemporary efforts to preserve the continuity of the Scottish philosophical tradition on the part of those alive to new themes emanating from Kant and philosophy in Germany. Ferrier's strategy aimed at re-invigorating Descartes and Berkeley by drawing on elements in Adam Smith's social philosophy. But the promising steps taken in this direction in Ferrier's essays on consciousness were seriously undermined, in Cousin's view, by the aprioristic character of his Institutes, in which he abandoned the careful empirical method characteristic of Scottish philosophy as practiced by Reid.

Irish Episcopalians in the Scottish Episcopal Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway during the Nineteenth Century

In his recent doctoral thesis, the author has undertaken the fundamental research of a close examination of the composition of congregations, to establish the substantial contribution of working-class Church of Ireland immigrants to the nineteenth-century expansion of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway in the west of Scotland. He has thereby supplied a correction to the usual Episcopalian idea that the Scottish Church was the outcome of the interaction between a native Scottish tradition and influences from England. He has also redressed the other emphases in this area, by working-class historians, who tend to neglect working-class religious activity altogether, and by historians of Irish emigration, who concentrate primarily upon Catholic emigrants, or in a secondary sense, stress the role of Presbyterian emigrants at the expense of members of the Church of Ireland. This essay delineates the limits to this Irish influence, in the barriers to working-class participation in religion, and in the different characteristics of the Episcopal tradition in Scotland and Ireland, the former increasingly Catholic-minded, the latter strongly Protestant.

DE HUTCHESON A SMITH: UN SENTIMENTALISMO 'SOFISTICADO

Francis Hutcheson is known as a proto-utilitarian. Adam Smith, though, his most prominent student an successor on the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, focuses on some different trends of his teacher's ethics and founds, based on the same sentimentalism, a completely different theory of morals. On this paper I explore what aspects of Hutcheson's ethics -particularly those of ‘sympathy' and the ‘impartial spectator'- where already present in his theory, and how Smith develops those intuitions in order to introduce a moment of rationality in moral judgments, whereby he is able to construct a theory that includes practical reasoning, without betraying the Scottish sentimentalist tradition.

The Meaning of History: A Dedicatory Letter from Giovanni Ferrerio to Abbot Robert Reid in his Historia abbatum de Kynloss

This is the first critical edition and translation of a 1537 letter from the Italian Humanist, Giovanni Ferrerio, to the Scottish Cistercian Abbot, Robert Reid of Kinloss. Together with the ad lectorem, it prefaces Ferrerio's Historia abbatum de Kynlos. The edition is based on two autograph manuscripts of the text, now in Rome and Edinburgh, which have not previously been collated. An introduction and notes set the texts in the context of Humanist historiography and Scottish history. They show that a flourishing ‘northern Renaissance’ spread even to the shores of the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland, and that ties of friendship and common culture united scholars from Scotland and the Continent. It has been said that Humanist historiography hardly influenced the writing of ecclesiastical history until after the Council of Trent, but the letter reveals that Ferrerio's Historia is in a Scottish tradition of writing church history which unites Humanism and the chronicle tradition in the same manner as post-Tridentine sacred history.

The Phlogistic Role of Heat in the Chemical Revolution and the Origins of Kirwan's ‘Ingenious Modifications… Into the Theory of Phlogiston’1

Summary Contrary to common belief, Lavoisier's greatest phlogistic rival was not Joseph Priestley but Richard Kirwan, a fact that was firmly recognized by both the Lavoisians as well as Priestley himself. During the 1780s, which saw the unprecedented rise of the chemistry of air(s), Kirwan's ‘ingenious modifications…into the theory of phlogiston’, in Mme. Lavoisier's words, became the most dominant alternative to the revisionist pneumatic interpretations of the French. A genealogical contextualization of Kirwan's phlogistic contributions, the circumstances of their emergence and the nature of their evolution and impact, reveals the intricate process of transformation that pneumatic phlogistic thought and practice have undergone during the final years of phlogiston's existence. Originally introduced as an adverse reaction to Scheele's phlogistic reasoning, Kirwan's work evolved as a sophisticated integration between notions of aerial permutations and Adair Crawford's innovative formulation of the phlogistic role of heat, with its origins in the Scottish pneumatic tradition of Black and Irvine. Examining Kirwan's views against the background of metaphysical conflicts over the constitution of pneumatic entities and the role of phlogiston in pneumatic processes traces their origins and advances to a complex interplay between innovation and renovation, proclamation and reclamation, thus depicting the dynamics of (dis-)continuity in the broader phlogistic sphere from which Kirwan's ‘modifications’ have stemmed and which they came to forcefully represent.

Social education and social pedagogy: reclaiming a Scottish tradition in social work

Social pedagogy is the discipline underpinning work with children and youth across most of Europe. The concept has struggled to find a place within social work in the English-speaking world, partly because of difficulties in translation and partly as a result of different welfare traditions. In particular there is a limited conception of education within the Anglo American Saxon tradition and a consequent bifurcation of education and care. This article argues that ideas enshrined within social pedagogy have a resonance with Scottish approaches to social welfare, which culminate in the Kilbrandon Report of 1964. We argue that there are recurrent themes in the Scottish tradition with roots in the Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment. Foremost amongst these is the focus on education as a vehicle for both individual improvement and social cohesion. Social pedagogy or social education offers an integrating conceptual base from which to develop models of social work practice which promote social wellbeing through socio-educational strategies. The current review of social work in Scotland offers opportunities to reclaim a socio-educational tradition.

Participative democracy in post-devolution Scotland: has the ‘people's parliament’ lived up to its name?

SUMMARY The Scottish Parliament established in 1999 as part of the Labour government's ambitious programme of constitutional reform aimed at modernizing the governance of the United Kingdom, was expected to inaugurate a new style of politics, based upon a ‘participative approach to the development, consideration and scrutiny, of policy and legislation’, as recommended by the Consultative Steering Group on the Scottish Parliament in its report published in December 1998.1 As we look back to its first eight years of existence, can it be said that the ‘people's parliament’ has lived up to its name? The engagement of Scotland's civil society in the constitutional debate and the Scottish constitutional tradition of popular sovereignty have informed the ethos of the new Scottish Parliament, which has committed itself from the outset to encouraging civic participation. While it has developed innovative ways of providing access to the policy making process, thereby differing decisively from the conventional model of representative democracy embodied by Westminster, the Scottish Parliament does indeed combine elements of both the representative and the participatory models, which makes it a particularly interesting case to study in the context of the general dissatisfaction observed in Western democracies with the representative model of governance.

The Isolated System of Quantifiable Experiences in the 1783 "Mémoire sur la chaleur" of Lavoisier and Laplace

The thesis of the present paper is that the famous memoir of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Pierre Simon Laplace of 1783 inaugurated the study of a new unit of experimentation, the isolated system of quantifiable experiences. It was defined by a linear equation, ruled by a principle of thermal reversibility and realised experimentally by a calorimetric apparatus. This notion took its origins from a specific context of studies of heat and its quantification that involved the two scientists from 1777: attempts to verify the mechanisms of combustion and animal respiration. Born from an original interpretation of the principle of conservation of vires vivae, the concept of system is deeply connected with the formulation of a new way to quantify chemical reactions. This method leaves nonquantifiable entities out of consideration and is the basis of the subsequent principle of conservation of matter. This paper argues that the Lavoisierian concept of system arises from the eighteenth-century studies on heat and from an experimental approach different from that of the quantitative chemistry of the Scottish tradition. Following this new logic, the transformation of vital air into fixed air was proved to be the effect of combinations between specific basis and heat, not determined by the addition/subtraction of matter: the combustion of bodies and animal respiration could never be considered mere inflammatory processes.

Regenerating a Highland Heritage - Lord Mar's approach to the historic house and landscape, 1700–1732

This essay examines the Highland heritage of John Erskine, the 6th and 11th Earl of Mar (1675–1732) and how it influenced his architectural and landscape designs. Mar was an amateur architect and landscapist in the time of Sir William Bruce and James Smith; all three were Jacobites and this may explain their attachment to castellated architecture and the distinctiveness of their approach in redesigning castles. Mar shared this approach in the renovations of his own house at Alloa; but, unlike the other Scottish classicists in his circle, he integrated castellated forms into his plans for completely new classical houses. Linked with this feeling for the Scottish tradition of castellation was Mar's respect for the Highland landscape, thus this article ends with the attribution to Mar of a great woodland landscape at Invercauld in Aberdeenshire.

Scotland's Gift: Philosophy, Theology, and the Gifford Lectures

Appreciation of the Scottish contribution to philosophy and theology is particularly marked in North America, especially among those in Reformed traditions, on account of the influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish thinkers. The Scottish view of the importance of intellectual reflection on fundamental questions concerning the nature of humanity and its place within the cosmos is represented also by the lecture series established by the bequest of Adam Lord Gifford. This essay explores the impact of the Scottish tradition and reviews the course of the Gifford Lectures, then reflects on their future.