Reading the Scottish Enlightenment

Mark R. M. Towsey, Ph.D. in History (St Andrews, 2007), is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Liverpool. He has previously held fellowships at Harvard, Yale and London, and has published extensively on eighteenth-century libraries and reading habits.

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society's 2011 Scottish History Book of the Year Award“[This] book is a triumph. Towsey’s primary research is both impressively detailed and extraordinarily wide-ranging, even by the high standards of studies in this field generally.”Matthew Bradley, Pembroke College, Oxford. In: Library & Information History, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 199-200. "Towsey pays particular attention to letters, diaries, marginalia and commonplace books. On all these matters he is a splendid mine of well-structured information [...]. In this exhaustively researched book Towsey provides a most persuasive argument for the claim that the works of the literati reached deep into Scottish society, not only in the university towns but across Scotland more generally, and that the books of the literati were not just accessible, but accessed and interpreted."Alexander Broadie, University of Glasgow. In: The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 2 (2012), pp. 365-367. "This book gets to the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment ... [Towsey] convincingly sets out his methodologies, provides detailed evidence to support them, and develops and provides new insights into our knowledge and understanding of the social impact of the Scottish Enlightenment in provincial Scotland." Heather Holmes, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society."The story Towsey tells here is intellectually compelling, even moving."Stephen W. Brown, Trent University, Ontario. In: The Library, 7.13.3 (September 2012). pp. 347-349.

• List of TablesAcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction “Enlightenment Everywhere”: Locating the Reader in the Scottish Enlightenment 1PART I: ENCOUNTERING ENLIGHTENMENTChapter One“One of the Greatest Ornaments to a Gentleman”: Private LibrariesChapter Two “A Powerful Means of Improving the Neighbourhood”: Subscription LibrariesChapter Three“Vice and Obscenity Dreadfully Propagated”: Circulating LibrariesChapter Four“A Taste for Reading in the Country”: Religious and Endowed LibrariesPART II: EXPERIENCING ENLIGHTENMENTChapter Five “This Map of my Mind”: Recovering Historical Reading ExperiencesChapter Six“A Man of Moderate Passions”: Fashioning an Enlightened SelfChapter Seven “That Independency which a Whole Nation had Renounced”: Negotiating Scottish IdentityChapter Eight “The Patron of Infidelity”: Reading Hume and the Common Sense PhilosophersConclusion“Improved and Enlightened by Reading”: A Provincial Enlightenment?BibliographyIndex