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 book demonstrates how the 'common law mind' was able to meet the various challenges posed by Enlightenment rationalism and civic and commercial discourse, revealing that the common law played a much wider role beyond the legal world in shaping Enlightenment concepts.

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.

This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

This account examines some of the areas of women's political activity in Britain from the Glorious Revolution to the election of the first female Prime Minister in 1979. It shows how women had worked in a variety of arenas and organizations before the suffrage campaign and explores the directions their political activity took afterwards.

The essays contained in this volume examine the particular religious experiences of women within a remarkably vibrant and formative era in British religious history. Scholars from the disciplines of history, literary studies and theology assess women's contributions to renewal, change and reform; and consider the ways in which women negotiated institutional and intellectual boundaries. The focus on women's various religious roles and responses helps us to understand better a world of religious commitment which was not separate from, but also not exclusively shaped by, the political, intellectual and ecclesiastical disputes of a clerical elite. As well as deepening our understanding of both popular and elite religious cultures in this period, and the links between them, the volume re-focuses scholarly approaches to the history of gender and especially the history of feminism by setting the British writers often characterised as 'early feminists' firmly in their theological and spiritual traditions.

Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women’s health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, “gender,” sex, “masculinity” and “femininity,” adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Théophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Françoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment.

Philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain was diverse, vibrant, and sophisticated. This was the age of Hume and Berkeley and Reid, of Hutcheson and Kames and Smith, of Ferguson and Burke and Wollstonecraft. Important and influential works were published in every area of philosophy, from the theory of vision to theories of political resistance, from the philosophy of language to accounts of ways of governing the passions. The philosophers of eighteenth-century Britain were enormously influential, in France, in Italy, in Germany, and in America. Their ideas and arguments remain a powerful presence in philosophy three centuries later. This Oxford Handbook is the first book ever to provide comprehensive coverage of the full range of philosophical writing in Britain in the eighteenth century. It provides accounts of the writings of all the major figures, but also puts those figures in the context provided by a host of writers less well known today. The book has five principal sections: 'Logic and Metaphysics', 'The Passions', 'Morals', 'Criticism', and 'Politics'. Each section comprises four chapters, providing detailed coverage of all of the important aspects of its subject matter. There is also an introductory section, with chapters on the general character of philosophizing in eighteenth-century Britain, and a concluding section on the important question of the relation at this time between philosophy and religion. The authors of the chapters are experts in their fields. They include philosophers, historians, political theorists, and literary critics, and they teach in colleges and universities in Britain, in Europe, and in North America.

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.