Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh

This collective biography depicts Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, John Home, and William Robertson as an intimate coterie that played a central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, seen here not only as an intellectual but as a cultural movement. It portrays these Moderate literati as zealous activists for the cause in which they believed, ranging from support for a Scots militia, Ossian, and Roman Catholic relief to opposition to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the American and French Revolutions.