On the Edge of Reason

This chapter explores engagement at the Scottish universities with new intellectual trends between the Reformation and Enlightenment. The chapter begins by assessing the impact of the reformation on Scottish higher education, and the role of the humanist and reformer Andrew Melville in creating a network of modern godly seminaries out of the three pre-reformation universities and the two new protestant arts colleges established in Edinburgh and in New Aberdeen. It then reviews the limited range of Scottish curricular innovations that emerged in response to broader European developments in ‘proto-empirical’ thinking and research in the early seventeenth century. The chapter concludes that intellectual innovations at Scotland’s universities across this period were disjointed and circular, with teaching ultimately remaining Aristotelian in form and content. However, a broader continuity of aim—the creation of a ‘godly’ commonwealth and the education of ministers to populate it—underpinned all the developments in this period.