THAT THERE WAS a considerable tradition of historical scholarship in Scotland from the Reformation to the early eighteenth century we have now established beyond reasonable dispute. We have identified the common assumptions which supported it and, most importantly perhaps, the cultural values by which its development was both conditioned and legitimated. As a result we find ourselves in a strong position to offer an account of Scottish Enlightenment discourse in a longer intellectual perspective. The main business of this chapter will be to examine in particular those points at which enlightened scholarship is commonly thought to have deviated from the prior tradition in Scotland. In effect, we shall be trying to rethink the relationship which Scottish Enlightenment scholarship bore to its immediate native predecessor. This will involve us in three related inquiries. The first will consider the claims of enlightened scholars and their later acolytes that they were truly the harbingers of an intellectual revolution. We will see that the case for acknowledging a methodological transformation of historical writing in Scotland is weakened both by a comparison with earlier Scottish scholarship and by the rigorous criticism to which it was in fact subjected by eighteenth-century scholars themselves. It will even be argued that some enlightened authors questioned the dubious credentials of this revolution. Not a few, I will suggest, retained a keen interest in earlier Scottish scholarship, seeking to defend its central assumptions and premises against the critical onslaught of the more vociferous modernists. Our next aim will then be to readjust the narrow thematic focus in which previous students have often tended to conceive the Scottish Enlightenment achievement. I shall argue here that the eighteenth century gave rise to a historical movement which was both much larger and in some ways less innovative than has usually been recognised. Important developments, associated with economic progress, political stability, and religious tolerance, certainly tended to distinguish enlightened scholarship from what had gone before. But I will suggest that historical writing in Scotland also continued to display a degree of polemical commitment and a concern for crucial traditional interests which, on the whole, limited the extent of innovation. Thirdly and finally, we shall examine how Scottish scholars now chose to articulate their own moral and social purpose as historians.