Presents major new research on gender in the Scottish EnlightenmentWhat role did gender play in the Scottish Enlightenment? Combining intellectual and cultural history, this book explores how men and women experienced the Scottish Enlightenment. It examines Scotland in a European context, investigating ideologies of gender and cultural practices among the urban elites of Scotland in the 18th century.The book provides an in-depth analysis of men's construction and performance of masculinity in intellectual clubs, taverns and through the violent ritual of the duel. Women are important actors in this story, and the book presents an analysis of women's contribution to Scottish Enlightenment culture, and it asks why there were no Scottish bluestockings.

The eighteenth century looms large in the Scottish imagination. It is a century that saw the doubling of the population, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, the political Union of 1707, the Jacobite Rebellions and the Enlightenment - events that were intrinsic to the creation of the modern nation and to putting Scotland on the international map. The impact of the era on modern Scotland can be seen in the numerous buildings named after the luminaries of the period - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson - the endorsement of Robert Burns as the national poet/hero, the preservation of the Culloden battlefield as a tourist attraction, and the physical geographies of its major towns. Yet, while it is a century that remains central to modern constructions of national identity, it is a period associated with men. Until recently, the history of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, with perhaps the honourable exception of Flora McDonald, remained unwritten. Over the last decade however, research on women and gender in Scotland has flourished and we have an increasingly full picture of women's lives at all social levels across the century. As a result, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on what we know about Scottish women during the eighteenth century, to ask how their history affects the traditional narratives of the period, and to reflect on the implications for a national history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Divided into three sections, covering women's intimate, intellectual and public lives, this interdisciplinary volume offers articles on women's work, criminal activity, clothing, family, education, writing, travel and more. Applying tools from history, art anthropology, cultural studies, and English literature, it draws on a wide-range of sources, from the written to the visual, to highlight the diversity of women's experiences and to challenge current male-centric historiographies.

Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries?Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ahard man has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of what masculinity actually means for men (and women) in a Scottish context. This interdisciplinary collection explores a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, examining the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour.How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romance, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men a work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce a the book also illustrates the range of masculinities which affected or were internalised by men. Together, they illustrate some of the ways Scotlands gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how more generally masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history.ContributorsLynn Abrams, University of GlasgowKatie Barclay, University of AdelaideAngela Bartiem University of EdinburghRosalind Carr, University of East LondonTanya Cheadle, University of GlasgowHarriet Cornell, University of EdinburghSarah Dunnigan, University of EdinburghElizabeth Ewan, University of GuelphAlistair Fraser, University of GlasgowSergi Mainer, University of EdinburghJeffrey Meek, University of GlasgowCynthia J. Neville, Dalhousie University Janay Nugent, University of Lethbridge Tawny Paul, Northumbria University

Caritas, a form of grace that turned our love for our neighbour into a spiritual practice, was expected of all early modern Christians, and corresponded with a set of ethical rules for living that displayed one's love in the everyday. Caritas was not just a willingness to behave morally, to keep the peace, and to uphold social order however, but was expected to be felt as a strong passion, like that of a parent to a child. Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self explores the importance of caritas to early modern communities, introducing the concept of the 'emotional ethic' to explain how neighbourly love become not only a code for moral living but a part of felt experience. As an emotional ethic, caritas was an embodied norm, where physical feeling and bodily practices guided right action, and was practiced in the choices and actions of everyday life. Using a case study of the Scottish lower orders, this book highlights how caritas shaped relationships between men and women, families, and the broader community. Focusing on marriage, childhood and youth, 'sinful sex', privacy and secrecy, and hospitality towards the itinerant poor, Caritas provides a rich analysis of the emotional lives of the poor and the embodied moral framework that guided their behaviour. Charting the period 1660 to 1830, it highlights how caritas evolved in response to the growing significance of romantic love, as well as new ideas of social relation between men, such as fraternity and benevolence.

This book examines the role of Scottish Enlightenment ideas of belonging in the construction and circulation of white supremacist thought that sought to justify British imperial rule. During the 18th century, European imperial expansion radically increased population mobility through the forging of new trade routes, war, disease, enslavement and displacement. In this book, Onni Gust argues that this mass movement intersected with philosophical debates over what it meant to belong to a nation, civilization, and even humanity itself. Unhomely Empire maps the consolidation of a Scottish Enlightenment discourse of 'home' and 'exile' through three inter-related case studies and debates; slavery and abolition in the Caribbean, Scottish Highland emigration to North America, and raising white girls in colonial India. Playing out over poetry, political pamphlets, travel writing, philosophy, letters and diaries, these debates offer a unique insight into the movement of ideas across a British imperial literary network. Using this rich cultural material, Gust argues that whiteness was central to 19th-century liberal imperialism's understanding of belonging, whilst emotional attachment and the perceived ability, or inability, to belong were key concepts in constructions of racial difference.

This is the first book specifically devoted to exploring one of the longest-running controversies in nineteenth-century Britain – the sixty-five-year campaign to legalise marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister. The issue captured the political, religious and literary imagination of the United Kingdom. It provoked huge parliamentary and religious debate and aroused national, ecclesiastical and sexual passions. The campaign to legalise such unions, and the widespread opposition it provoked, spoke to issues not just of incest, sex and the family, but also to national identity and political and religious governance.

Masculinities on Clydeside explores the experiences of civilian men on Clydeside during the war, using oral history interviews as a means to explore subjectivity and arguing for continuous personal agency through major historical changes. While men in reserved occupations are understood as extensively influenced by 'imagined' discourses, often resulting in feelings of guilt and emasculation, their subjectivities were nonetheless ultimately rooted in their 'lived' and immediate local vicinities, and the people and places of their everyday lives. This ultimate relevance of lived existence and the everyday also meant that while wartime relations between men and women were clearly shaped by a range of gender discourses and continually renegotiated, gender boundaries were never fixed or truly separate.The analysis looks at wider subjectivities, encompassing national and political identities, class consciousness, religious subjectivities and social activities, as well as examining women's experiences of working in reserved occupations in wartime and their interactions with civilian men.

For the British government's supporters in Scotland in the 1790s, one thing was paramount: they were fighting French principles in any shape or form they might take. Whether this meant defeating the influence of French revolutionary ideas in Scotland, or defeating the military menace of the French republic, they were determined to stand firm in their support of the British state.This book charts the Scottish contribution to, both the war effort of the 1790s, and the British governments struggles to defeat political radicalism at home; lasting from the first outbreak of political disturbances in Scotland in 1792, until the French revolutionary war came to an end in 1802. In this, the Scots made their very distinct mark in terms of recruitment for armed service, demonstrations of loyalty, and prosecutions against political radicals in the law courts but, perhaps less so, in terms of their financial contributions . The government of Scotland was further integrated into the British state in a structural sense over the course of the decade, yet retained many distinctly Scottish features none the less and on the whole the 1790s comes across as a time when the Scots found little difficulty in seeing themselves as both British and Scottish.

This first in-depth study of women’s politeness examines the complex relationship individuals had with the discursive ideals of polite femininity. Contextualising women’s autobiographical writings (journals and letters) with a wide range of eighteenth-century printed didactic material, it analyses the tensions between politeness discourse which aimed to regulate acceptable feminine identities and women’s possibilities to resist this disciplinary regime. Ylivuori focuses on the central role the female body played as both the means through which individuals actively fashioned themselves as polite and feminine, and the supposedly truthful expression of their inner status of polite femininity.