Boswell's Edinburgh Journals

Boswell's Edinburgh Journals
Author: Hugh Milne
Publisher: Birlinn
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0857905864

James Boswell's relish for life, unflinching honesty and wide social contacts make him one of the raciest and most entertaining of all diarists.This is a one-volume edition of the journals he kept while making his living as an advocate in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Hugh Milne's introduction and notes remove the barriers that time has placed between us and Boswell. The result is a book in which an extraordinary personality lives before us upon the page. Boswell embodied in himself all the extremes and contradictions of his time and place. This was the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment, and among his friends he counted thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith, and entertained eminent visitors like Dr Johnson. Boswell was alive to every new social or political idea and was interested in all the drama of human life, whether high or low. All Boswell's public and private doings, and his inner debates about religion and the meaning of life, go unedited into his journal. His vivid description of a whole gallery of characters and situations makes its pages compulsively readable.

The Press and the People

The Press and the People
Author: Adam Fox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 661
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192508814

The Press and the People is the first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland. It traces the production and distribution of ephemeral publications from the nation's first presses in the early sixteenth century through to the age of Burns in the late eighteenth. It explores the development of the Scottish book trade in general and the production of slight and popular texts in particular. Focusing on the means by which these works reached a wide audience, it illuminates the nature of their circulation in both urban and rural contexts. Specific chapters examine single-sheet imprints such as ballads and gallows speeches, newssheets and advertisements, as well as the little pamphlets that contained almanacs and devotional works, stories and songs. The book demonstrates just how much more of this literature was once printed than now survives and argues that Scotland had a much larger market for such material than has been appreciated. By illustrating the ways in which Scottish printers combined well-known titles from England with a distinctive repertoire of their own, The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular literature in early modern Scotland and its contribution to British culture more widely.

Studies in Ephemera

Studies in Ephemera
Author: Kevin Murphy
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013-01-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1611484952

Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print bringstogether established and emerging scholars of early modern print culture to explore the dynamic relationships between words and illustrations in awide variety of popular cheap print from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. While ephemerawas ubiquitous in the period, it is scarcely visible to us now, because only a handful of the thousands of examplesonce in existence have been preserved. Nonetheless, single-sheet printed works, as well as pamphlets and chapbooks, constituted a central part of visual and literary culture, and were eagerly consumed by rich and poor alike in Great Britain, North America, and on the Continent. Displayed in homes, posted in taverns and other public spaces, or visible in shop windows on city streets, ephemeral works used sensational means to address themes of great topicality. The English broadside ballad, of central concern in this volume, grew out of oral culture; the genre addressed issues of nationality, history, gender and sexuality, economics, and more. Richly illustrated and well researched, Studiesin Ephemera offers interdisciplinary perspectives into how ephemeralworks reached their audiences through visual and textual means. It also includes essays that describe how collections of ephemera are categorized in digital and conventional archives, and how our understanding of these works is shaped by their organization into collections. This timely and fascinating book will appeal to archivists, and students and scholars in many fields, including art history, comparative literature, social and economic history, and English literature. Contributors: Georgia Barnhill, Theodore Barrow, Tara Burk, Adam Fox, Alexandra Franklin, Patricia Fumerton, Paula McDowell, Kevin D. Murphy, Sally O’Driscoll, Ruth Perry

Charles Areskine’s Library

Charles Areskine’s Library
Author: Karen Baston
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004315381

In Charles Areskine’s Library, Karen Baston uses a detailed study of an eighteenth-century Scottish advocate’s private book collection to explore key themes in the Scottish Enlightenment including secularisation, modernisation, internationalisation, and the development of legal literature in Scotland. By exploring a surviving manuscript dated 1731that lists a Scottish lawyer’s library, Karen Baston demonstrates that the books Charles Areskine owned, used in practice, and read for pleasure embedded him in the intellectual culture that expanded in early eighteenth-century Scotland. Areskine and his fellow advocates emerged as scholarly and sociable gentlemen who led their nation. Lawyers were integral to and integrated with the Scottish society that allowed the Scottish Enlightenment to take root and flourish within Areskine’s lifetime.

Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment

Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Roger L. Emerson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2008-04-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0748631291

This book considers the politics of patronage appointments at the universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews, exploring the ways in which 388 men secured posts in three Scottish universities between 1690 and 1806. Most professors were political appointees vetted and supported by political factions and their leaders. This comprehensive study explores the improving agenda of political patrons and of those they served and relates this to the Scottish Enlightenment. Emerson argues that what was happening in Scotland was also occurring in other parts of Europe where, in relatively autonomous localities, elite patrons also shaped things as they wished them to be. The role of patronage in the Enlightenment is essential to any understanding of its origins and course.

Enlightenment in a Smart City

Enlightenment in a Smart City
Author: Murray Pittock
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474416616

This is a study of Enlightenment in Edinburgh like no other. Using data and models provided by urban studies theory, it pinpoints the distinctive features that made Enlightenment in the Scottish capital possible.

A Higher World

A Higher World
Author: Michael Fry
Publisher: Birlinn
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2014-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857908324

This new and compelling history of eighteenth-century Scotland paints a rich and detailed portrait of the country at a time when it was of truly global significance. This journey from the Union of 1707 to its centenary and beyond takes in vivid scenes from all over the country, and ranges up and down the social scale from peeresses to prostitutes, from lairds to lunatics, and covers every major aspect of national life from agriculture to philosophy. Whilst most other Scottish histories published in recent times concentrate on social and economic history, Michael Fry demonstrates that any true understanding of the nation, in the past as in the present, needs to pay at least as much attention to politics and culture. The social and the economic history show us how Scotland was integrated into Britain, whilst the political history and the cultural history show us why the integration was never complete. In this book both sides are surveyed, offering new perspectives on Scotland's experience within the Union.