Impossible Antiquities: Scottish Enlightenment Nationalist Identities And Reactions To Historical Revisionism

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Abstract: Growing discourse on how narratives of the past influence self-perception necessitates new examinations of historical revisionism and how readers receive and react to revisionist literature. This project will approach this topic by investigating the critical reception of Thomas Innes' 1729 piece, A Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain, or Scotland throughout the eighteenth century. A Catholic priest and historian who spent most of his life in Paris, Innes (1762-1744) used new analysis of documentary evidence to challenge the idea that the Stuart monarchy had an uninterrupted lineage stretching into antiquity, a provocative reading of history which complicated a key facet of Scottish identity. This project will investigate mid and late-eighteenth century challenges to Innes's historical narrative, particularly focusing on their intellectual and religious contexts and the responses which they received. Through a close reading of these critical responses in the form of both published works and private correspondences, the ideologies of their authors will be explored and connected to recent scholarship on identity formation and the nation in the early modern world.Summary of existing literature and this project's contribution:This project would necessarily be interdisciplinary in nature, and so it is worth noting the existing literature in several relevant fields. Beginning with the area of Scottish history, while there has been some work done on Thomas Innes' writings (housed in the University of Edinburgh Library's Laing collection), it has predominantly focused on their significance to the Jacobite cause, maintaining a Scottish focus and largely neglecting their international context. As a result, the reception of these writings by contemporaries has received little attention with the exception of Kelsey Jackson Williams' recent book, The First Scottish Enlightenment. Rebels, Priests, and History, which underscores the significance of Innes' writings as well as their historical context and some examples of how they were received in their time. This project, however, would delve further into Innes' reception both within his own time (Jackson Williams' titular "First Scottish Enlightenment") and throughout the following decades. For further context on Enlightenment Scottish identity I will draw on works such as Colin Kidd's Subverting Scotland's Past and Roger A. Mason's Kingship and the Commonweal. These books, however, do not include sufficiently thorough investigations of Innes' influences, and so they fall short of providing a comprehensive examination of his role in Scottish historical revisionism. Similarly, the degree to which the French Catholic environment in which Innes produced his writings shaped his thinking deserves more focused attention.