Encountering Political Texts at the National Library of Scotland 1: An Appetiser

The National Library of Scotland. Image by Rachel Hammersley

Next week the exhibition 'Encountering Political Texts' opens at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). This is the second exhibition related to the 'Experiencing Political Texts' project (an account of the first, which was held at Newcastle University's Philip Robinson Library last summer, can be found here). It is also our final Experiencing Political Texts event. Though the general themes are similar to those in the Newcastle exhibition, the focus of each cabinet and the items on display are different. Next month's blog will offer a full account of the exhibition, this month I provide a quick taster, discussing what are perhaps my favourite items in the exhibition - the volumes produced by Thomas Hollis.

I have discussed Hollis in previous blogs, and so will not repeat those details here. Instead I will focus on the volumes in the NLS collection, some of which feature in our exhibition. These volumes originally formed part of the Advocates Library of Edinburgh. This was a law library that was officially opened in 1689. From 1710 it became a legal deposit library, meaning that it received a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. Between 1752 and 1757 the Keeper of the Advocates Library was the philosopher and historian David Hume. In 1925 the National Library of Scotland was created by an Act of Parliament

Hollis made donations to the Advocates Library at various points during the 1760s and 1770s, at a time when he was also sending books to Oxbridge college libraries and to public and university libraries in Europe and North America. Many of the NLS Hollis volumes include a dedication, written in Hollis's hand. Though the messages vary slightly from copy to copy the basic formula is this:

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

An Englishman, a lover of liberty, citizen of the world, is desirous of having the

honor to present this to the Advocate's Library at Edinburgh.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library

Most of the Hollis volumes at the NLS are bound in red Morocco with symbols added to the cover in gold tooling and stamped in black ink on the inside pages. They were the work of John Matthewman, who was Hollis's main bookbinder until around 1769 when he absconded due to a debt.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

Among the volumes sent to the Advocates Library were several works from the commonwealth tradition. These include Henry Neville's Plato Redivivus, which had first appeared in 1681 at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. It sought to apply the principles set out by Neville's friend James Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) to the very different political situation of the 1680s. The work was republished by Andrew Millar in 1763. Hollis seems to have been quick to call for a second edition since an entry in Hollis's diary for 15 November the following year records a conversation Hollis had with Millar in which he 'Engaged him to reprint, that master-work intitled "Plato Redivivus. Or a Dialogue concerning Government", written by Harry Neville the friend of James Harrington, and like him ingeneous.' (The Diary of Thomas Hollis V from 1759 to 1770 transcribed from the original manuscript in the Houghton Library Harvard University, ed. W. H. Bond. Cambridge, Mass., 1996. 15 November 1764). The dedication in the Neville volume is a little fuller than the basic version reproduced above, with Hollis declaring himself a lover not merely of liberty but also of 'the Principles of the Revolution & the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover'. The tools on the cover of this volume are a cockerel on the front and an owl on the back, with a Pilius (liberty cap) on the spine. The cockerel symbolises alertness or vigilance, the owl - wisdom, and the Pilius - liberty. Inside the volume is a stamp depicting Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) and one of Britannia (NLS: [Ad].7/1.8).

Also in the collection, though not in an original Hollis binding and probably not donated by Hollis himself, is a copy of Algernon Sidney's, Discourses Concerning Government. First published in 1698 by John Toland, the volume was reprinted several times during the eighteenth century with additional material being added each time. The copy in the NLS is a 1772 reprint of the 1763 edition printed by Andrew Millar that was edited by Hollis and which marked the high point of the work in terms of size, incorporating a biography of Sidney, additional works by him, and letters taken from the Sidney papers. This version includes an Advertisement signed by J. Robertson and dated 21 October 1771, which explains that various corrections (not previously picked up) had been made regarding the names old English names and places. The volume also includes the famous engraving of Sidney that Hollis commissioned from Giovanni Cipriani in which Sidney is dressed in armour and enclosed within a laurel wreath. Below that image, and repeated on the title page and later in the work, is a small Pilius, highlighting Sidney's commitment to liberty.

John Milton, The Life of John Milton (London, 1761). National Library of Scotland, Dav.1.2.10. Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

As well as publishing the first version of Sidney's Discourses, Toland had also published the works of John Milton in 1698. To accompany this, he wrote and printed The Life of John Milton which was then reprinted by Millar in 1761. This was another of the works that Hollis sent to the Advocates Library in the 1760s. It is particularly interesting because it has not one but three gold tools on both the front and the back. On the front is Athena with a branch on one side of her and a feather on the other. On the back the cockerel, Britannia, and the owl. The proliferation of gold tooling perhaps reflects the particularly high esteem in which Hollis held Milton. Hollis referred to Milton as 'divine' and 'incomparable'. And as well as collecting and disseminating Milton's works, Hollis had a picture of him in his apartment and even managed, in 1760, to purchase 'a bed which once belonged to John Milton, and on which he died'. This he sent as a present to the poet Mark Akenside, suggesting that if 'having slept in that bed' Akenside should be prompted 'to write an ode to the memory of John Milton, and the assertors of British liberty' it would be sufficient recompense for Hollis's expense (Memoirs of Thomas Hollis. London, 1780, pp. 93, 104, 112).

Following J. G. A. Pocock, a sharp distinction has tended to be drawn between the commonwealth writers (including Milton, Sidney and Neville) and John Locke. Now much questioned, this distinction also does not appear to have existed for Hollis who felt quite able to celebrate Locke as well as Milton. Several copies of Locke's works appear among the Hollis volumes in the NLS. One of these (a copy of the 1764 edition of Two Treatises of Government produced by Millar) resembles the commonwealth works in depicting Athena on the front and the Pilius on the back (with stamps of a Harp and Britannia on the fly leaves). Another emphasises the association of Locke's works with liberty by repeatedly using the Pilius image (NLS: [Ac].4/1.7).

Finally, several of the volumes donated by Hollis to the Advocates Library focus on religious rather than political matters, including several by the clergyman and religious controversialist Francis Blackburne (1705-1787). Born, like Hollis himself, in Yorkshire, Blackburne lived most of his life in Richmond. Though he became a clergyman in the Church of England, Blackburne subsequently refused to subscribe again to the Thirty-nine Articles, the defining statement of the doctrines and practices of that Church. His best known work The Confessional (which Hollis had persuaded him to publish and to which he gave his commendation 'Ut Spargum' - that we may scatter them) engaged with the history of the Church of England and the controversies over subscription. It was a text that prompted a fierce pamphlet exchange, allegedly amounting to ten volumes worth of material (B. W. Young, 'Blackburne, Francis', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). The presentation copy of The Confessional that Hollis gave to the Advocates Library bears a stamp of Athena inside the front cover and one of an owl in the back. The front bears a gold tool of Caduceus or staff of Hermes, a symbol of peace and rebirth, and the back a gold-tooled branch with leaves (NLS: Nha.Misc.32).

Francis Blackburne, Considerations on the present state of the controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1768). National Library of Scotland: Nha.Misc.31. Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

Hollis also presented a copy of Blackburne's Considerations on the present state of the controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain and Ireland (1768) which, like the Milton volume, bears more than one emblem on the front and back covers. In the centre of the front cover is a gold-tooled Britannia, with a cockerel placed in the bottom left corner. The back depicts Athena centrally with an owl bottom right. The spine features the Caduceus (Nha.Misc.31).

Though he remained within the Church of England, Blackburne had close family connections to Theophilus Lindsey and John Disney who were involved in the establishment of Unitarianism, suggesting a link to Hollis's own Dissenting position. Moreover, just as Hollis devoted his life to preserving the memory of great thinkers of the past and present, so Blackburne played a crucial role in preserving the memory of Hollis himself. Following his friend's death, Blackburne produced a two-volume account of Hollis's life, which has been described as a 'memorial to Hollis's radical tradition' (Young, 'Blackburne, Francis', ODNB).

A number of the Hollis volumes described in this blogpost will be on display at the 'Encountering Political Texts' exhibition at the National Library of Scotland between Friday 8th December 2023 and Saturday 20th April 2024.

Moderation and Enlightenment

The week commencing 17 January 2022 was a bumper one for conferences at Newcastle University, with not one but two events organised by members of our Ideas and Beliefs research strand in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology. Both hosted excellent papers, and so, while it means a disruption to the series on British Republicans that I started in January, it seems appropriate to devote a blogpost to each conference.

Here, I will focus on 'What was Moderate about the Enlightenment? Moderation in Eighteenth-Century Europe', organised by Dr Nick Mithen - a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow currently based at Newcastle University. This conference grew out of Nick's research project Via Media Italica: The Scholar, the Jurist, the Priest: Moderation on the Italian Peninsula, 1700-1750. As the title of the conference indicates, the aim was to explore the complex relationship between moderation and enlightenment.

Of course, a conference on the theme of moderation inevitably sparks discussions over how that term should be understood. In this regard I was struck by the parallels between the difficulties that arise when applying the term 'moderation' to the eighteenth century and those surrounding early modern 'radicalism'. In the case of 'radicalism' a key issue is that the term was not coined until 1819, so it may be argued that it is anachronistic to apply it to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since no-one engaged in politics at that time would have called themselves 'radicals'. By contrast, 'moderation' was a term used in the eighteenth century and several thinkers discussed at the conference did use it to describe themselves. In his keynote address, John Robertson provided examples of David Hume's use of the term. Yet, understanding what figures like Hume meant by it - or what we might mean by applying it to the period of the Enlightenment - remains a tricky issue. In part this is because, just like 'radicalism', 'moderation' is often understood in relative rather than absolute terms. As one contributor, Doron Avraham, asked explicitly - can we speak of a 'moderate ideology' or is moderation always just a middle way between two other positions?

This leads on to the question of whether we can describe specific individuals as 'moderate'. To return to Robertson's keynote, Hume might appear quintessentially 'moderate' on a range of issues and was explicit about the value of moderation in relation to party politics but it is difficult to understand either his religious views or his attitude to race in this way, making it problematic to regard him as a proponent of Enlightenment moderation. Damien Tricoire prompted similar arguments in relation to Denis Diderot. Diderot has often been presented as a 'radical' thinker, yet a convincing case was put for him being seen as a 'moderate', since he rarely questioned the existing political order of his society and was careful about what he said publicly. Working in the opposite direction, Carlos Perez Crespo challenged the idea that Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès's conception of sovereignty was an act of moderation, arguing - on the basis of a careful dissection of Sieyès's position - for his radicalism on this point. Other contributors provided examples of individuals who appeared moderate at one point in their careers, but not at others. For example, Niklas Vogt, the subject of Matthijs Lok's paper, constantly adjusted his position in response to changing political circumstances. As well as defining and redefining their position in relation to events, individuals might also do so in relation to others. Vera Fasshauer's paper on Johann Konrad Dippel's quarrel with the Halle Pietists demonstrated this very clearly. She ended her paper by raising the pertinent question of which position was more moderate - that of the Pietists who sought to avoid confrontation or that of the radicals who insisted on the toleration of different opinions? The question of what constitutes a 'moderate' position is a particularly difficult one to answer in the case of eighteenth-century women writers. Simply writing and publishing could be seen as a radical act for an eighteenth-century woman, but acknowledging this makes it difficult to distinguish between what we might think of as more clearly 'radical' writers and more 'conservative' ones. This is an issue that Geertje Bol is addressing directly in her work on Mary Astell and Catharine Macaulay, and her discussion of Astell's clever redefinition of moderation as 'zeal directed towards the proper (spiritual and moral) ends' was revealing in this regard.

Anna Letitia Barbauld by John Chapman after unknown artist. Stipple engraving. 1798. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D4457. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

A number of papers presented the idea of moderation as a tempering tendency that might be applied to a range of different views. Thus Nicolai von Eggers presented the idea of the comte de Montlosier moderating the counter revolution, while Natasha Lomonossoff described Anna Barbauld's position as one of 'moderate radicalism'. Similarly, Elad Carmel began his paper by telling us that in an unsent letter to Hume, Robert Wallace had described himself as a 'moderate freethinker', while Mark McLean showed how Lord Hailes (Sir David Dalyrmple) combined the moderation of the Scottish Enlightenment with Christian orthodoxy.

All of this raises the question of how moderation was to be enacted and here too there was a range of interesting responses. For some of the authors discussed, it was a question of balance, whether through the mediating role of a particular group such as the nobility or whether through a careful institutional system of checks and balances. For others it was about identifying and following a middle way. As Matilda Amundsen Bergström showed, Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht sought a via media between Enlightenment thought and more traditional Swedish ideas. Similarly Anna Barbauld sought a middle way between stasis and revolution, and Robert Wallace attempted to navigate between those who rejected Christianity and those who rejected any investigation of religion.

Philip Doddridge by George Vertue after Andrea Soldi. Line engraving. 1751. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D2278. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

A moderate position was often associated, as Shiru Lim reminded us, with the promotion of civility and the banishing of disagreeability, and also with the adoption of peaceful rather than violent means. Lim's own paper explored the role that theatre was seen to play by some in the moderation of the passions. Other papers placed emphasis on the dissemination and discussion of a range of ideas in the spirit, pace Anna Barbauld, of using persuasion rather than force and of convincing rather than imposing one's views on others. Pauls Daija's fascinating paper on the Baltic case, focused on the use of education for the purposes of moderation, with books being deliberately directed at Latvian peasants to prepare them for freedom. In this case there was some care taken over the type of material that was shared, with an emphasis on useful knowledge and civilising literature rather than overtly political works, but in other cases a more open policy was adopted. For example, Robert Strivens demonstrated that Philip Doddridge presented texts expressing a wide variety of opinions to his students, deliberately exposing them to writings that opposed his own views. Similarly, Doron Avraham mentioned a multilingual version of the New Testament produced by the Pietists, which was designed to meet the needs of all confessions within the German lands.

Portrait of Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht by an unknown artist. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The very notion of a multilingual Bible as an agent of moderation highlights the importance of genre and the role it could play in the process of moderation. This theme, which is close to my current interests, was also reflected in Bergström's discussion of Nordenflycht's writings. Her use of poetry to discuss philosophical matters may seem strange to twenty-first century eyes, but Bergström made clear that it was not unusual for Swedish writers at the time. However, the particular form Nordenflycht adopted in one of the texts discussed - with a first section consisting of questions addressed to a leading Swedish scholar and a second part offering replies - was particularly appropriate to the pursuit of a moderate line. Similarly as Marc Caplan demonstrated, Isaac Euchel's play Reb Henoch: Oder Woss tut me damit? deliberately used linguistic pluralism as a means of reflecting different viewpoints.

As is often the case with such discussions I came away less sure of what 'moderation' means in the context of the eighteenth century than I was at the start, but I was certainly more enlightened!

An Interlude: Thinkers as Readers

Programme for the workshop ‘David Hume as Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume’, 03.05.19.

In my last few blogposts I have been examining some of the thinkers whose works influenced James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana. There are more figures I want to explore in future posts, but this month I want briefly to digress, by looking at someone who was influenced by him: David Hume. This is prompted by the fact that on 3rd May I attended a stimulating workshop at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh entitled 'David Hume as a Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume'. The workshop was organised by Max Skjönesberg and Robin Mills and included excellent papers by various scholars each of whom examined the ways in which the works of a particular thinker or genre influenced - or, in the words of the workshop’s subtitle, provoked - Hume. Working on my own paper for this workshop, at the same time as thinking about the various authors who inspired Harrington, led me to reflect more generally on this approach to the history of political thought, what it reveals, and how it could be used to enhance and enrich more conventional studies.

Of course, focusing on authors as readers of other authors immediately brings to the fore various problems. Several speakers at the workshop raised the question of what might constitute reliable evidence of one author having read another. The catalogue of a thinker's personal library, or one to which we know that thinker had access (as in the case of Hume and the Advocates Library), can be useful in this regard. The presence in such a catalogue of a particular book makes it possible, in some cases even probable, that the thinker had read that work, but on its own it cannot prove that (s)he did so. Even when it can be established that a thinker did read a particular work - for example where annotations in their own hand are found in a copy of the work, or where references are made in a commonplace book, diary or correspondence - it does not necessarily follow that that reading then influenced their own thought or writings. 

A more fruitful indication is evidence of one author borrowing (whether explicitly or implicitly) from another. In future, further advances may be made in this area as a result of improvements in digital technology, such as the development of sophisticated machine reading software. Yet it is also important to remember that a lack of critical engagement with a work does not necessarily constitute proof that the author has not been influenced or provoked by it. Furthermore, awareness of the ideas of a particular thinker may develop by reading abridgements or reviews rather than the work itself, or via discussions in settings such as debating societies or political clubs.

Statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

A second observation to be made is that influence itself does not always take a simple form. This is something that I was particularly aware of in exploring Hume's reading of Harrington. Occasionally it is possible to identify an example of one thinker directly appropriating an idea from another. Hume, for example, adopts Harrington's preference for the rule of laws rather than men, though we might query whether he derived this directly from Harrington's works or via an intermediary and, indeed, whether Oceana was the true origin of that idea. Elsewhere we can find examples of thinkers embarking from a similar starting point, but moving in different directions, or of them using different methods to achieve similar ends. Alexandra Chadwick offered an example of the former in her paper on Hobbes and Hume, where she showed that they started from similar foundations in terms of their views of human nature and psychology, but diverged with regard to the vision of mankind and society that they sought to paint. Working the other way around, I noted that Hume shared Harrington's concern with accountability, but rejected his mechanism of rotation of office, and instead sought alternative measures to achieve that end. 

Joseph Collyer, portrait of David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery SP IV 7711.

This idea shades into another way of thinking about influence, which was explicitly articulated by Tim Stuart-Buttle, whereby one thinker generates problems or questions that are then addressed by later generations. This astute observation raises further questions and complexities. It might equally be the case that two contemporary thinkers engage with similar problems or adopt similar approaches not because one has influenced the other, but simply because they are operating within a common political and cultural context. Tim Hochstrasser suggested that this perhaps explains at least some of the affinities between Voltaire and Hume. Richard Whatmore complicated the idea in a different way, suggesting that it sometimes appears as though an author is only influential when (s)he is totally misunderstood by the next generation. Among the papers at the workshop there were certainly several examples of reading against the grain. For instance, Danielle Charette suggested that Hume did not read Machiavelli in the traditional way, but instead sought to move beyond the moralism of many eighteenth-century accounts, modelling instead how Machiavelli might be read fruitfully in the modern world.

While undoubtedly complex, there can be no doubt that juxtaposing authors in this way and examining in detail the connections - and the divergences - between their ideas, can enrich our understanding of the thought of both thinkers. On the basis of this, I was led to wonder whether focusing on reading might provide us with a new dimension to the exploration of intellectual history. Reading offers a middle way between the traditional 'great thinkers' approach to the history of political thought and the contextual methodology pioneered by members of the Cambridge School. Cambridge School historians quite rightly challenged the assumption that the great thinkers of the past were simply conversing with each other and were unaffected by the historical events and more trivial and quotidian intellectual debates going on around them. They have shown, for example, that Hobbes was deeply affected by the experience of living through the English Civil War and was responding to contemporary debates, such as that surrounding the swearing of the Engagement Oath - an oath of loyalty to the new regime in the aftermath of the regicide. Yet this emphasis on historical and intellectual context can sometimes lead us to forget that these people also read and responded to the writings of prominent thinkers who had gone before them. By adding some consideration of who and what thinkers of the past were reading, alongside what they were experiencing and which intellectual debates they were engaging with, we can perhaps produce a richer and more nuanced understanding of the genesis of their ideas.