Kelsey Jackson Williams's Books

The First Scottish Enlightenment

Rebels, Priests, and History

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams

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The First Scottish Enlightenment

Rebels, Priests, and History

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not-yet fully realised precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a 'First' Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, Humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland's two principal religious minorities--Episcopalians and Catholics--in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.

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Page Count

554

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192537598

ISBN 13

9780192537591

The First Scottish Enlightenment

Rebels, Priests, and History

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams

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The First Scottish Enlightenment

Rebels, Priests, and History

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams

This book argues that the 'first' Scottish Enlightenment was championed by minority groups traditionally assumed to have been backward-looking and conservative--Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics--and that it resulted in a dramatic transformation of how Scots understood their history.

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Page Count

368

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198809697

ISBN 13

9780198809692

A History and Catalogue of the Lindsay Library, 1570–1792

The Story of 'Some bonie litle bookes'

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams,Jane Stevenson,William Zachs

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A History and Catalogue of the Lindsay Library, 1570–1792

The Story of 'Some bonie litle bookes'

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams,Jane Stevenson,William Zachs

This is the first study of Jacobean Scotland's largest library: the collection assembled over several generations by the Lindsays of Balcarres.

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Page Count

539

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

900450379X

ISBN 13

9789004503793

The Antiquary

John Aubrey's Historical Scholarship

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams

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The Antiquary

John Aubrey's Historical Scholarship

By: Kelsey Jackson Williams

John Aubrey (1626-1697), antiquary, natural philosopher, and virtuoso, is best-remembered today for his Brief Lives, biographies of his contemporaries filled with luminous detail which have been mined for anecdotes by generations of scholars. However, Aubrey was much more than merely the hand behind an invaluable source of biographical material; he was also the author of thousands of pages of manuscript notebooks covering everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. Kelsey Jackson Williams explores these manuscripts in full for the first time and in doing so illuminates the intricacies of Aubrey's investigations into Britain's past. The Antiquary is both a major new study of an important early modern writer and a significant intervention in the developing historiography of antiquarianism. It discusses the key aspects of Aubrey's work in a series of linked chapters on archaeology, architecture, biography, folklore, and philology, concluding with a revisionist interpretation of Aubrey's antiquarian writings. While covering a wide variety of scholarly territory, it remains rooted in the common thread of Aubrey's own intellectual development and the continual interaction between his texts as he studied, discovered, revised, and rewrote them across four decades. Its conclusions not only substantially reshape our understanding of Aubrey and his works, but also provide new understandings of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.

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