SCOTLAND HISTORY

Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind by James Buchan

Publisher's Synopsis
In Crowded with Genius, James Buchan, himself a Scot with a strong attachment to this history, beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.Buchan has written an extraordinary account of the movement that turned Edinburgh from a city under siege into a hotbed of brilliant achievements that changed the course of history and gave birth to the modern mind.

Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740-1800 by John R. McIntosh

Publisher's Synopsis
This study of Enlightenment Scotland diverts attention from the Moderate Party, with its focus on the small group of Edinburgh literati, to the unexpectedly broad-based Popular Party which opposed patronage in the Church of Scotland, and which included all shades of theological and political opinion. As well as delineating the evolving theological re-alignment which led eventually to the 19th-century Evangelical revivals and which contributed much to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, the book suggests it is the emergence of an intellectually confident grouping of ministers who were orthodox Evangelicals, but "englightened" thinkers which is the most significant feature of the 18th-century Church.

Social Change in the Age of the Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660-1760 by Rab A. Houston

Synopsis
Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment and a city of international significance. The lives and ideas of its prominent figures have received extensive treatment, but little attention has been paid to the society which produced them. In this wide-ranging study of Edinburgh over a century of social change, R. A. Houston offers unrivalled breadth of analysis of the ways in which urban life was transformed. Chapters on social relationships, the use of space, the place of the poor in Scotland's capital, religious values and attitudes to urban living, riot, and popular protest, and developments in political economy build up to a powerful argument about social change in the decades before the Enlightenment. As well as providing unique depth of context for Enlightenment studies, this book explains how broader changes in social attitudes and values took root in a century which witnessed dramatic political, economic, and intellectual developments. It is a major contribution not only to Scottish but also to British history.

The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment by Christopher J. Berry

Synopsis
The Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century has lacked an accessible, authoritative overview. This book fills that gap by synthesizing the thinking of an extraordinarily significant group of philosophers and other scholars. It encompasses the well-known thinkers (David Hume, Adam Smith) and the little-known (James Dunbar, Gilbert Stuart), as well as others (Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, John Millar). The author focuses on how, by taking human sociality as their premise, these thinkers produced important analyses of historical change, politics, and morality, together with an assessment of their own commercial society. Including a comprehensive survey of secondary literature, this work is an insightful, much-needed introduction to the core figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment by Alexander Broadie

Synopsis
A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish thinkers, in philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science and law. The contributors also relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy in Europe, America and beyond. The volume is of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.

The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation by Alexander Broadie