The Sixth Scottish University. The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799 by Tom McInally (review)

Tom McInally’s welcome study of the Scots Colleges on the continent of Europe draws on research for his PhD dissertation at the University of Aberdeen, defended in 2008. The volume builds on previous studies: Maurice Taylor on the Scots College in Spain (1972); Mark Dilworth on the Scottish Benedictine monasteries (1974); Brian Halloran on the Scots College, Paris (1997); and McCluskey (ed.) on the Scots College, Rome (2000).Through such works and others, the pervading narrative has become a familiar one of colleges that sought—against a background of penuriousness and inconsistent governance—to prepare priests who would return to tend to the scattered, discrete Catholic communities of Scotland. This was a task fraught with all kinds of difficulties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The book has six chapters. After an introductory overview in chapter 1, chapter 2 outlines the development of the various colleges (at Douai, Paris, Madrid, and Rome) as well as the so-called Schottenkloster (Benedictine foundations) at Regensburg, Würzburg, and Erfurt. Chapter 3, although titled “The Education Provided,” actually moves beyond a discussion of the curricula studied by students to ask broader questions relating to the impact of new learning and Enlightenment values on the colleges’ alumni. Chapter 4 applies prosopographical methods in analyzing the geographical backgrounds and family connections of students. Chapter 5 provides analysis of the future careers of students—many going on to become Jesuits rather than seculars returning to the Scottish mission—and a more general (but useful) outline of the history of the Scottish mission between the aftermath of the Reformation (in the 1560s) and 1799. Finally, chapter 6 provides a brief summary of the book’s principal theses.

What, therefore, does McInally ultimately bring to the field in terms of those theses? First and foremost, a clue lies in the title of the work itself—he makes connections between the various institutions. McInally is keen to make the case for the Scots Colleges as a group to be considered a fully-fledged university. The argument is made most explicitly at various junctures (pp. 47, 71, 211). Although one may not be entirely convinced by what is undoubtedly an attractive argument, McInally has put his finger on a key insight—namely, that the continental Scots Colleges need to be understood less in isolation and more in broader contexts of connections with each other and with contemporary scholarly currents. There are certainly stand-out individuals who merit the attention given them in this book: the first Historiographer Royal, Thomas Dempster (1579–1625); the architects James Smith (c. 1645–1731) and James Gibb (1682–1754); and the biblical scholar and poet Alexander Geddes (1737–1802). These are but three examples of Scots College alumni whom McInally presents as making an impact on their wider societies. It is fascinating to learn of the early experiments in electricity by another alumnus, Andreas Gordon, of whom McInally muses that his lack of recognition in his native country is probably due to the fact that he was a “Scottish Benedictine monk working in Germany at a time when Catholicism was outlawed in his own country” (p. 117). Herein lies McInally’s second major insight. The story of the continental Scots Colleges still awaits fuller integration into the “general history” of Scotland and Scottish education in particular. McInally’s conscientiously researched and engrossing work underlines once again that the Scots Colleges abroad should no longer be seen as peripheral or tangential to the “core” Scottish experience. In sum, this is a book deserving of a wide readership amongst those interested in the development of education and cultural interchange in early-modern Europe.