In Charles Areskine’s Library, Karen Baston uses a detailed study of an eighteenth-century Scottish advocate’s private book collection to explore key themes in the Scottish Enlightenment including secularisation, modernisation, internationalisation, and the development of legal literature in Scotland. By exploring a surviving manuscript dated 1731that lists a Scottish lawyer’s library, Karen Baston demonstrates that the books Charles Areskine owned, used in practice, and read for pleasure embedded him in the intellectual culture that expanded in early eighteenth-century Scotland. Areskine and his fellow advocates emerged as scholarly and sociable gentlemen who led their nation. Lawyers were integral to and integrated with the Scottish society that allowed the Scottish Enlightenment to take root and flourish within Areskine’s lifetime.

This book is a fundamental reassessment of the nature and impact of legal humanism on the development of law in Europe. It brings together the foremost international experts in related fields such as legal and intellectual history to debate central issues

This is the first study of Jacobean Scotland's largest library: the collection assembled over several generations by the Lindsays of Balcarres.

List of members in v. 2-17.