The First Scottish Enlightenment

Historically Thinking

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The First Scottish Enlightenment

Kelsey Jackson Williams on the forgotten roots of Scotland’s intellectual flowering

Historically Thinking

Jun 10, 2020

Introduction

Typically the “Scottish Enlightenment” is the term for the great burst of intellectual creativity that was centered on Edinburgh and Glasgow and began in the 1720s. It saw advances made in philosophy, law, economics, medicine, and geology, by David Hume, Adam Fergusson, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and William Robertson—to name but a few.

A typical view—or, to use a favorite Historically Thinking term, the “Standard Received View” sees the Scottish Enlightenment as an unlikely or even surprising set of events. It followed, after all, “a century of relative turmoil” that was capped by the financial failure of the Darien colony, the politically fraught Union of Scotland and England in 1707, and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745.

However Kelsey Jackson Williams argues that even amidst the turmoil of Scotland’s late seventeenth century there were still intellectual forces at work without which there would have been no subsequent explosion. But rather than centered on the Scottish cities and Lothian, this “First Scottish Enlightenment” was focused on the great houses in the northeast of Scotland, and on the city and university of Aberdeen. Rather than Presbyterian, it was Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Jacobite. And finally, rather than a focus on philosophy and what we might think of as the “social sciences”, it dealt with history and literature—to untangle the history of the kingdom of Scotland, as well as its literary heritage.

About the Guest

Kelsey Jackson Williams is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling. He is the author of The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests, and History (Oxford University Press, 2020) and has published widely on early modern intellectual and literary culture in Scotland. His research often explores the interplay of politics, religion, and intellectual life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.