This collection explores the richness of Scottish intellectual life, its currents and controversies, from the French Revolution to the First World War, focusing in particular on the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Offering a series of cutting-edge interventions, the contributors cast light on a range of individuals, themes and episodes from the period. Topics range from the role of women as intellectuals to the rise of a science of race, and from freethinking secularism to the debate over George Davie's influential account of 19th-century universities. Collectively, the chapters represent a pioneering overview of Scottish intellectual life during the long 19th century.

Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques--low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives--to convert their readers. The application of such techniques to popular science resulted in one of the most widely available sources of information on the sciences in the Victorian era.
A fascinating study of the tenuous relationship between science and religion in evangelical publishing, "Science and Salvation" examines questions of practice and faith from a fresh perspective. Rather than highlighting works by expert men of science, Aileen Fyfe instead considers a group of relatively undistinguished authors who used thinly veiled Christian rhetoric to educate first, but to convert as well. This important volume is destined to become essential reading for historians of science, religion, and publishing alike.

The nineteenth century was an age of transformation in science, when scientists were rewarded for their startling new discoveries with increased social status and authority. But it was also a time when ordinary people from across the social spectrum were given the opportunity to participate in science, for education, entertainment, or both. In Victorian Britain science could be encountered in myriad forms and in countless locations: in panoramic shows, exhibitions, and galleries; in city museums and country houses; in popular lectures; and even in domestic conversations that revolved around the latest books and periodicals.
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Science in the Marketplace" reveals this other side of Victorian scientific life by placing the sciences in the wider cultural marketplace, ultimately showing that the creation of new sites and audiences was just as crucial to the growing public interest in science as were the scientists themselves. By focusing attention on the scientific audience, as opposed to the scientific community or self-styled popularizers, "Science in the Marketplace" ably links larger societal changes--in literacy, in industrial technologies, and in leisure--to the evolution of "popular science."