The First Scottish Enlightenment: rebels, priests and history. By Kelsey Jackson Williams. Pp xvi + 351, 10 ills. Oxford University Press, 2020. isbn 9780198809692. £90 (hbk).

Abstract

stage throughout the scene. Notwithstanding these reservations, Grant’s monograph remains a valuable achievement, and offers subtle and scholarly readings not only of the movement of Latin into Italian and English, but also of Greek into Latin. This sophisticated conspectus of the development and intertextuality of the elegiac genre represents a genuine advance on previous theoretical work in the field. In Grant’s own elegantly paradoxical formulation, ‘two-directional, “backwards reception” is, surely, the way forward’ (p ): in David Lodge’s academic satire Small World (), budding academic Persse McGarrigle proposes an MA thesis on ‘The Influence of T S Eliot on Shakespeare’. Cometh the hour : : :