THE FIRST SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT: PART 1

What – and where – was the Scottish Enlightenment? For the past 50 years, scholars have located it in Edinburgh, in the elegant drawing rooms of the New Town, where Adam Smith and James Boswell held forth; in the book stalls of the Old Town, where one might find David Hume or the historian William Robertson in search of a longed-for volume; or in the bustling halls of the University of Edinburgh, where the philosopher Dugald Stewart and the physician Alexander Monro lectured. According to this story, the whole sprawling body of Auld Reekie formed the epicentre of Enlightenment in Scotland. In my new book, The First Scottish Enlightenment, I make a bold but simple claim: this story is false. Or, rather, this story is true, but only so far as it goes. There was a massive reception of Enlightenment culture in mid- and late-18th century Edinburgh and this moment – when writers from the Athens of the North were being read across Europe – is a key period in Scottish intellectual history.

But this was not how the Scottish Enlightenment began. Instead, the ‘first’ Scottish Enlightenment began in the 1680s – half a century before most traditional narratives – and it was centred not on Edinburgh, but on the north-east of Scotland: the fertile coastal plain separated from the south and west by Am Monadh, that high range of mountains which includes the Cairngorms and the peaks further west. This region, called Scotia ultramontana – ‘Scotland beyond the mountains’ – or simply ‘Northland’ by contemporaries, was the site of a remarkable blossoming of Enlightenment thought in the decades following James VII and II’s accession to the throne in 1685. Comprehending new approaches to history, archaeology, linguistics, natural sciences and a host of other fields of knowledge, its practitioners fundamentally transformed the Scottish intellectual landscape long before the Enlightenment as we now know it began. In this first of a two-part series, I want to look in more detail at why the Enlightenment began in the north-east, before turning in the second part to the more thorny questions of how it interacted with