Description:
This book is a major contribution to the social history of ideas. It brings to life the intellectual, moral and political milieu that fostered the Scottish Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century.
Brief description: Richard B. Sher is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus in the Federated History Department of New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He has published widely on topics relating to eighteenth-century Scotland, including The Enlightenment and the Book (2006), Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (2nd ed., 2015), and many articles, book chapters, and edited volumes.
Review Quotes:
Produced as an Edinburgh Classic Edition, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment is positioned now as what it was when it first appeared in print: a magisterial consideration of the society that undergirded a particular Scottish enlightenment. This text is no less important now than it was in 1985... He opens with 'Reflections' that position the book more fully in its academic context in 1985, and in the debates thereafter. (There is also a helpful update to the bibliography.) What emerges brings the historian of 1985 into focus, a move increasingly necessary, and increasingly revealing, as we move toward the third decade of the twenty-first century.
--Caroline McCracken-Flesher, University of Wyoming "Journal of Scottish Historical Studies "