Matthew Sangster, University of Glasgow
12 October, 12-1, Project Room, 50 George Square.
Centre for the History of the Book seminar.
Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities
The difficulty of accessing quantitative and qualitative records of historical reading has been an enduring challenge for book historical studies. Twentieth-century scholarship on reading habits was often forced to rely on anecdotal or impressionistic accounts that skewed towards elite and unusual readers. However, the advent of simple digital technologies such as the spreadsheet and the database means that data recorded in formerly inflexible sources can be made sortable, searchable and indexable, providing the basis for new data-driven studies of book and knowledge use.
This talk will demonstrate the potential of historical data from one particular group of sources: the surviving eighteenth-century library borrowing registers held by the Scottish universities. It will focus on six registers remaining at Glasgow, covering the period from 1757 to 1771 for students and 1751 to 1790 for professors, but will also allude to the far more copious records held at St Andrews and at the University of Edinburgh. Through discussing initial results from large-scale transcription work, it will reveal which books and genres were popular among readers in the Enlightenment universities; show how books passed between readers; and discuss patterns and trends in borrowing over time. In addition, it will examine marginalia in surviving books located using borrowing frequency data to demonstrate the character of eighteenth-century engagements with the printed word. While one St Andrews student helpfully added an inscription to his library’s copy of Addison’s Works stating that ‘It is a most scandalous thing to write upon the liberary books which are deposited there for the use & benefits of such persons as please to have recourse to them’, copious surviving annotations indicate that Scottish readers employed institutional collections in deeply sociable manners. While eighteenth-century reading could be quiet and insular, the records of the universities demonstrate that it was often collaborative, public, performative and deeply contentious.