Introduction
Just last month, I had the privilege of traveling to Scotland to visit archives related to Macaulay and her network of letters. These included trips to the National Records of Scotland and National Library of Scotland, both located in Edinburgh, as well as the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collections, located roughly two hours north of the city. I was particularly interested in examining how Macaulay’s circle intersected not only with English and American intellectual networks, but also with the community of thinkers associated with what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment.
The Scottish Enlightenment formed part of the broader intellectual movement of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, sharing its emphasis on reason, empirical inquiry, and skepticism toward forms of authority that could not be justified through rational argument. More specifically, Scottish thinkers placed particular value on empirical observation and on the cultivation of virtue as a means of improving both individuals and society. Figures like David Hume, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, James Hutton, and Robert Burns helped shape a vibrant intellectual culture whose influence spread well beyond Scotland, reaching across Great Britain and into the wider Atlantic world.
This research trip also marked an important personal milestone for me. Although I had previously visited Edinburgh, I had never traveled to Scotland alone, nor had I undertaken an independent research trip abroad (apart from my time living in London). I arrived with a clear sense of what I hoped to accomplish, drawing on earlier archival work I had completed in Boston and Chicago while researching Macaulay. Those trips had given me experience navigating archives and planning research travel, and they provided a useful point of comparison for my time in Scotland. Together, the archives I visited revealed how Scottish intellectual networks intersected with the literary, political, and philosophical worlds in which Macaulay and her contemporaries moved.
Research Travel and Archival Work: Comparing Boston and Scotland
My earlier research trip to Boston provided the closest comparison to my recent time in Scotland. The summer before I’d completed my MA thesis, I spent a little over a week in Boston, thanks to a grant from the Hopkins Office of Undergraduate Research. I took an eight-hour train to and from the city, stayed in a hostel while there (a minor miracle that American hostels exist), spent my time outside the archive exploring Boston’s parks, shopping (I’d accidentally bought shorts for one hundred dollars, to my dismay), and unexpectedly running into a few friends.
Most of my research in Boston took place in three institutions: Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections, and, most importantly, the Massachusetts Historical Society. My days were spent cramming as much reading as possible into the eight hours that the archives were open, applying for new library cards, and then winding down in the evenings with beach-read-level fiction to give my brain a break.
Although my trips to Boston and Scotland shared many similarities, they also differed in important ways. The travel time was comparable, and my lodging arrangements, hostels and Airbnbs, proved equally unpredictable. In both places I also made time to explore cities that were new to me. While I didn’t buy any overly-expensive shorts in Scotland, I did try vegan haggis and fish, and loved the haggis so much, I ate it for three days in a row.
Despite these parallels, the Scotland trip presented a number of unexpected challenges. On the way to Edinburgh, I missed my first train due to a freak fire near my house in London, despite leaving more than an hour and a half earlier than necessary. The train I eventually caught was so delayed that I arrived in Edinburgh over two hours late (though I at least qualified for delay repay, which covered the cost of the second ticket). My accommodations also proved more eventful than those in Boston: one evening in Edinburgh turned into an hours-long debate about Marxism that ended with a new friend in tears, while my Airbnb stay in Aberdeen became uncomfortable enough that I ultimately reported the host to the police.
At the same time, the trip demonstrated how much my research skills have improved. Compared with my earlier archival work, I found that I managed my time more efficiently and approached the research process with greater confidence. I was already familiar with procedures such as applying for reader passes and requesting materials in advance, and I felt much more comfortable corresponding with archivists to identify relevant collections. Perhaps most importantly, my experience working with eighteenth-century manuscripts meant that I could read and transcribe cursive far more quickly than I had during earlier projects.
The trip also marked a turning point in my comfort with solo travel. My first extended experience traveling alone came after my semester at Cambridge, when I spent two weeks moving between cities across northwestern Europe by train. Although the trip was exciting, it was also deeply stressful: constant train delays, last-minute planning, and the realization that I could not perfectly schedule every moment forced me to adjust to a new level of independence. When I later traveled to Boston, I felt more confident, but I still relied somewhat on the familiarity of being in the United States and on spending time with friends who happened to be in the city.
By the time I arrived in Scotland, however, I felt that I had finally developed a sustainable rhythm for traveling and researching alone. Missing my first train to Edinburgh did lead to a brief moment of panic, but once I arrived I quickly settled into a routine. I tried to structure my days much as I would in London: attending a Fat Tuesday pancake breakfast, going to Ash Wednesday mass, visiting charity shops and vegan restaurants in the evenings, and making time for the gym. I read in old pubs, explored the city on foot, and reminded myself how fortunate I was to be able to conduct research in Scotland at all.
With that experience in mind, the remainder of this reflection turns to the archives themselves and to the materials I consulted in each collection.
The National Records of Scotland: Bluestockings and the Atlantic World
The first archive I visited in Edinburgh was the National Records of Scotland. Located in a striking stone building overlooking the Old Town, the archive primarily attracts researchers interested in Scottish census records, demographic history, and genealogy. One entire section of the building is devoted to family-history research, but the special collections reading room, where I worked, is located on an upper floor.
If you do visit the National Records, you’ll need multiple forms of ID as well as printed, small passport-style photos of yourself (which I got done at a local photography store). Photography is generally not permitted, but the reading room itself is impressive enough to leave a lasting impression even without pictures.
My research at the National Records focused on two collections: correspondence between the Bluestocking writer Elizabeth Montagu and the Scottish philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames, and a set of legal documents relating to a Scottish slave ship named Neptune. Although these materials address different subjects, both offered insight into the broader intellectual and economic networks that connected Scotland to the wider Atlantic world.
The first collection I examined consisted of letters from Montagu to Kames preserved in the Blair Drummond papers. These letters offer a vivid glimpse of the intellectual connections linking the Bluestocking circle with the Scottish Enlightenment. Montagu moved in many of the same intellectual circles as Catharine Macaulay, and her correspondence with Kames reveals how women participated in the philosophical debates of the period.
Montagu’s letters show that her relationship with Kames was not merely social but deeply intellectual. In one letter from March 1767, she reflects on classical history and civic virtue, invoking ancient Sparta and Athens in order to comment on the moral character of modern societies. Referring to contemporary debates about virtue and political courage, she writes that “in these piping times of peace… courage and magnanimity in the human breast” risk being dissipated in trivial pursuits. Such reflections echo the concerns of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers about the relationship between commercial modernity and civic virtue, ones that Macaulay was also very interested in (especially thinking back to her Sans Souci debate, which I elaborated on in my Scholarly Writing #5 post).
Other letters reveal the shared literary culture that connected Montagu to Scottish intellectual circles. Writing to Kames in July 1767, Montagu discusses contemporary historical writing and praises the work of George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, whose History of Henry II had recently appeared on the literary scene. Her playful remark that Kames might enjoy seeing “a Gothick building by a Roman architect” neatly captures the eighteenth-century fascination with blending classical models with modern historical writing.
The correspondence also reflects a close personal relationship between Montagu and the Kames family. Letters to Agatha Drummond, wife to Home, reveal Montagu’s concern for family matters and health, while still situating their friendship within a broader intellectual community. In a 1771 letter, Montagu expresses deep admiration for Kames’s character, writing that “a character so excellent as yours is rendered in a manner sacred by affliction,” a remark that reflects both personal sympathy and moral esteem. Together, these letters demonstrate how Bluestocking intellectual culture extended well beyond London. Through correspondence with figures such as Kames, Montagu participated in a wider transnational exchange of ideas that connected polite literary society with the philosophical debates of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Alongside these letters, I also examined a set of legal records relating to a slave ship named Neptune, which sailed out of Glasgow. Although these materials were not directly connected to my current project, they offered an important perspective on Scotland’s relationship to the Atlantic slave trade.
The documents, dating from 1762, describe a voyage undertaken several decades earlier in 1730. According to the ship’s commission, the Neptune was to leave Leith for Rotterdam carrying tobacco before proceeding through a series of trading stops intended to facilitate the purchase and transport of enslaved persons. The ship was to travel to the Coast of Guinea, where it would exchange goods for enslaved people, gold dust, and elephant ivory, before transporting those enslaved individuals to British colonies in the Caribbean, including Barbados and Jamaica. The ship then returned to Britain carrying commodities such as sugar and cotton.
The papers contain extensive information about the operations of the slave trade, including accounts that detail how many enslaved persons were bought and sold, to whom, and for what price. They also include reports on the health conditions of enslaved people aboard the ship and the commercial relationships among merchants involved in the voyage.
The legal dispute documented in these records began when Captain James Maxwell died off the Coast of Guinea in May 1731. After his death, the ship was taken over by other officers, who were accused in some correspondence of piracy. The central issue, however, concerned Maxwell’s “private adventure,” a portion of the voyage’s cargo that he had financed personally. Following his death, Maxwell’s family, the ship’s owners, and various traders all attempted to claim ownership of the cargo. These disputes continued for years after the voyage itself had concluded.
Although these materials were not directly tied to Macaulay’s intellectual network, they nonetheless reshaped how I thought about Scotland’s place within the Atlantic world. I had rarely associated Scotland with the slave trade in the same way I had with England or the American colonies. Yet these documents demonstrate that Scottish merchants and institutions were deeply involved in the economic systems that sustained slavery. More importantly, they prompted me to consider how Enlightenment thinkers in Scotland might have understood, or responded to, the slave trade differently from their English or American contemporaries, a question that would return in my later work in Aberdeen.
The National Library of Scotland: Science, Religion, and Enlightenment Culture
The second archive I visited was the National Library of Scotland. Located in the centre of Edinburgh’s Old Town, the library offers one of the most extraordinary reading-room views I have ever encountered. Looking out toward Arthur’s Seat, I happened to arrive during an unusually clear week in February. From the windows, I could watch hikers climbing the hills above the city and see the distant waters of the Firth of Forth beyond them.
My work at the National Library focused primarily on the writings and papers of James Graham, the brother of William Graham, who married Catharine Macaulay in 1778. Today Graham is often remembered as a “quack doctor,” but the materials preserved in the library reveal a far more complicated figure who participated in the vibrant intellectual culture of the late eighteenth century.
Educated in Edinburgh, Graham later travelled widely through Europe and North America before establishing himself in London. In 1780 he opened his famous Temple of Health on Pall Mall, a theatrical medical establishment that combined lectures, electrical apparatus, music, and spectacle.
Graham presented his work as part of a broader scientific mission dedicated to preserving health and extending human life. In his Travels and Voyages in Scotland, England, and Ireland, Graham describes years spent studying electricity, chemistry, and medicine across Europe and America. The book’s dedication is especially striking: Graham addresses it directly to Macaulay herself, praising her intellect and presenting her as both patient and patron. He describes her as the “foundation and grand pillar” of his reputation, crediting her with publicly endorsing his experimental medical treatments.
Perhaps more bizarrely, Graham’s collections also included his proposal for an establishment of “A New and True Christian Church.” In such a proposal, which I happened to read on Ash Wednesday of all days, he argues for the establishment of a new, true, Christian Church, which, among other details, would have no fixed liturgy, remain open at all hours, and welcome all individuals regardless of status. Churches, he argued, should be bright and open spaces dedicated solely to the teachings of the Bible.
Reading this proposal provided a welcome contrast to the more technical materials I had been consulting about electricity and medical experimentation. At the same time, it served as a useful reminder that religion and science were not easily separated in the eighteenth century. It offered me a reminder that I should not, in my own scholarship, merely disregard the Christian inflection of philosophical texts, or understandings of antiquity, but welcome them, and take time to think about how faith intersected with, or otherwise obstructed, how the persons I study made sense of the world around them.
In addition to Graham’s writings, the National Library also preserves materials from the Pantheon Society, an Edinburgh debating club whose surviving records offer a fascinating window into the city’s intellectual life. The society’s debates ranged widely in topic, from questions about patriotism and classical virtue to discussions about gender, reputation, and happiness. One meeting in 1784, for example, posed the question of whether personal beauty had brought more happiness or misery to women, while another debate asked whether the fear of death or the loss of reputation exerted the stronger influence on human behaviour.
Taken together, these materials reveal a world in which medicine, philosophy, political debate, and public performance overlapped in unexpected ways. Figures like Graham operated on the fringes of respectable intellectual culture, yet they also participated in the same vibrant environment of discussion and experimentation that connected Edinburgh’s debating societies, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the wider networks of writers and thinkers, including Macaulay.
University of Aberdeen Special Collections: James Beattie and the Abolitionist Tradition
My final research destination was the University of Aberdeen Special Collections, where I worked with MS 30, a collection of papers belonging to the Scottish philosopher and poet James Beattie, who spent his entire academic career as Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College in Aberdeen (which is now part of the University of Aberdeen). The collection includes a series of letters exchanged with Elizabeth Montagu, offering another revealing glimpse into the intellectual networks connecting Scotland and London.
One of the most striking aspects of the correspondence is the warmth of Beattie’s tone. Writing to Montagu in October 1771 as he prepared to return to Scotland, he expressed his gratitude for her support and friendship, assuring her that he remained deeply interested in her happiness and welfare. The letters reveal a relationship built not only on patronage but on sustained intellectual exchange.
Their discussions range widely. In one letter from 1773, Beattie reflects on an earlier treatise he had written on the origins of language, arguing that human speech must have been divinely bestowed rather than gradually invented. Elsewhere he reports on the reception of his work in Edinburgh, noting that his recent success had reignited disputes among philosophers, particularly those associated with David Hume.
The papers also shed light on Beattie’s engagement with classical learning. Reflecting on his own education, he recalled that students were taught to admire authors such as Homer and Virgil, but were rarely given guidance on how to interpret or evaluate their works. His appreciation of classical literature, he explained, developed largely through independent reading and reflection.
Perhaps the most significant document in the collection was the manuscript version of Beattie’s On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery, Particularly that of Negroes (1778). The treatise presents a powerful abolitionist argument and makes extensive use of classical history to condemn the practice of slavery in the eighteenth century .Beattie argues that even thinkers such as Aristotle, who defended slavery in ancient societies, would reject the institution if they could observe its modern form. As he put it, if Aristotle “were now to rise from the dead” and see the political condition of the Greeks themselves under Ottoman rule, he would surely reconsider the principles he had once defended.
Throughout the treatise, Beattie traces the history of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas, with particular attention to Spanish colonial expansion in the so-called New World. By combining classical history with contemporary examples, he demonstrates that slavery was neither morally defensible nor historically inevitable.
For my own research, these materials pointed in two important directions. First, they reinforced the observation that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers actively engaged with debates about the slave trade and its historical origins. Beattie’s use of classical antiquity to critique modern slavery parallels the strategies employed by writers such as Macaulay. Second, the documents reminded me that discussions of slavery and the Atlantic world cannot be confined solely to Anglophone contexts. They must also take into account the histories of Spain, the Caribbean, and the broader Americas.
Although my current research focuses primarily on Great Britain (partly because my language training is limited to English, Latin, and Ancient Greek), I hope that my future scholarship will engage more directly with the histories of the Americas. More specifically, I am interested in how Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and European settlers interacted with one another and made sense of the ancient world. In fact, scholars I look up to like Andrew Laird have already begun to illuminate this history. His recent book Aztec Latin (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the education and writings of Indigenous scholars in sixteenth-century Mexico. By highlighting the Latin works produced by Nahua intellectuals in the decades following the Spanish conquest, Laird demonstrates that Renaissance humanism extended far beyond Europe and formed part of a much broader global intellectual history.
Reading the Beattie papers ultimately reminded me that Aberdeen itself was far from intellectually isolated. Although the city may seem geographically remote today, Beattie’s correspondence demonstrates that Scottish universities were deeply embedded within the broader networks linking London salons, European scholarship, and the intellectual life of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Conclusion: Debates on Classical Learning
Taken together, these materials raise an important question for my research: how did eighteenth-century intellectuals think about the teaching and use of classical antiquity? As much as they spoke in the metaphors of classical antiquity, did they advocate for others to do the same? Did they think this learning was necessary for future generations? As I move to think about Macaulay’s last publication, which is written on the education of young learners, I am increasingly interested in how her colleagues might have thought, as well.
Across the eighteenth century, Greek and Roman antiquity continued to function as a dominant cultural authority in Britain. Yet many writers began to question how classical models were being used. Rather than serving as a source of moral and intellectual reflection, classical learning was increasingly treated as a marker of elite education and social prestige.
Members of the Bluestocking circle were particularly engaged in this debate. Elizabeth Montagu’s contributions to Dialogues of the Dead, edited by George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, offer one example of how classical forms could be repurposed to critique contemporary culture. Drawing on the classical tradition of satirical dialogue, Montagu used conversations between historical figures to reflect on modern political and social concerns. Classical antiquity thus became a vehicle for moral and cultural critique rather than a symbol of aristocratic authority.
A similar impulse shaped the work of fellow Bluestocking Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of All the Works of Epictetus brought the teachings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus to a wide English readership. Carter’s translation emphasized the practical ethical lessons of Stoic philosophy, presenting classical thought as a guide to self-discipline and moral improvement.
So too did James Beattie contribute to the same conversation in his Remarks on the Utility of Classical Learning, which defended the value of classical education while insisting on its intellectual and moral usefulness. Encouraged by Montagu, Beattie argued that classical study should cultivate judgment, taste, and ethical reflection rather than simply reinforce social distinction.
Taken together, these works reveal a shared effort to redefine the meaning of classical learning in the eighteenth century, an intellectual project that connected women like Macaulay, or Montagu, and Carter, with all the “greats” of the Scottish Enlightenment and broader intellectual world.