The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment

This is the first modern book-length study of the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the sometime University of Edinburgh student who in 1697 earned the unfortunate distinction of being the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain. Taking a micro-historical approach, Michael Graham uses the Aikenhead case to open a window into the world of Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain in its transition from the confessional era of the Reformation and the covenants, which placed high emphasis on the defence of orthodox belief, to the polite, literary world of the Enlightenment, of which Edinburgh would become a major centre.Graham traces the roots of the Aikenhead case in seventeenth-century Scotland and the law of blasphemy which was evolving in response to the new intellectual currents of biblical criticism and deism. He analyzes Aikenhead's trial and the Scottish government's decision to uphold the sentence of hanging. Finally, he details the debate engendered by the execution, carried out in a public sphere of print media encompassing both Scotland and England. Aikenhead's case became a media event which highlighted the intellectual and cultural divisions within Britain at the end of the seventeenth century.

Table of Contents:
Table of Figures; Abbreviations; A Note on the Text; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1: Edinburgh and Scotland in the mid-1690s; 2: The Politics of Blasphemy; 3: "So unnaturall a seasone": The Dreadful Year 1696; 4: The Making of a Blasphemer; 5: Trial and Execution; 6: The Aftermath: Public Opinion in Scotland and England; Conclusion; Bibliography of Works Cited; Index.

About the Author :
Michael F. Graham is Professor of History and sometime Director of the Humanities in the Western Tradition programme at the University of Akron, Ohio. His previous publications include 'The Uses of Reform: 'Godly Discipline' and Popular Behaviour in Scotland and Beyond, 1560-1610' (1996), which was awarded the Roland Bainton Prize by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. His research focuses on the religious, cultural and social history of early modern Britain.

Review :
Michael F. Graham tackles the infamous Aikenhead case with a microhistorical approach. He examines Aikenhead's case in the context of the social history of 1690s Edinburgh and explains how a student became a scapegoat… Graham makes a convincing case that social factors influenced the fate of Thomas Aikenhead. Aikenhead’s execution is considered a milestone on Scotland’s dark road to the Enlightenment and Graham shows us with vividness and some effective dramatic timing, the worst that can happen when self-righteousness and political expediency join forces. This is detailed and archivally informed historical writing - exploiting parish, judicial, ecclesiastical and private papers Graham delivers a textured sense of the tense atmosphere riven by a bustling and intellectually robust university and the assumptions of a civic society which assumed the rightness of divine punishment for public sins... An excellent contribution to contextualising both the possibilities and consequences of articulating dissident ideas in an anxious confessional culture. Michael F Graham uses the “microhistorical method … to give us the best account yet of Aikenhead’s life and hanging. It is painstaking research – all those fugitive legal documents and trawling through ancient library indexes – but it adds up to a rounded and enthralling if necessarily incomplete and speculative picture