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It has become commonplace in recent decades for scholars to identify in the books of the Scottish Enlightenment the intellectual origins of the modern world, but little attention has yet been paid to its impact on contemporary readers. Drawing on a range of innovatory methodologies associated with the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of the history of reading, this book explores the reception of books by David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson and Thomas Reid (amongst many others), assessing their impact on the lives, beliefs and habits of mind of readers across the social scale. In the process, the book offers a fascinating new perspective on the fundamental importance of personal reading experiences to the social history of the Enlightenment.
Price: $183.00
Pages: 366
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Library of the Written Word - The Handpress World
Publication Date:
24 September 2010
ISBN: 9789004184329
Format: Other
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.
“[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.
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.