Scottish Periodical Enlightenment

Abstract

Over twenty years ago now, David Riede suggested that the first quarter of the nineteenth century, generally referred to as the ‘Romantic Period’, could as easily and should perhaps more accurately be entitled the ‘Age of Reviews’.¹  Picking up on Riede’s revisionary suggestion, and because Ian Duncan’s notion of a ‘post-Enlightenment’ by its very name plays down the powerful continuities between the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and some of their literal and metaphorical pupils in the nineteenth,²  I want to suggest calling it the ‘Periodical Enlightenment’.