SHIFTING IDEALS OF BEHAVIOUR and sentiment served to assert manhood amongst different groups of men in eighteenth-century Scotland, and men could adopt different manly personas depending on locale and time of day. Take, for instance, James Boswell, who embodied polite and libertine manhood. His days in Edinburgh often progressed from heterosocial suppers and visits to the theatre with his wife and other women, to homosocial meetings of the Freemasons, Faculty of Advocates or intellectual societies, followed by drinking in a tavern or coffeehouse and sometimes sexual intercourse with women, including prostitutes.

Rather than a binary opposition, Georgian archetypes of the polite gentleman and the libertine stood at two ends of a continuum of possible masculinities, and landed and professional men could perform characteristics of these identities depending on the specific context. Boswell wished to achieve an ideal of refined, virtuous manhood but from his time as a young man visiting London through to married, professional life as a lawyer in Edinburgh, his behaviour displayed adherence to a libertinism of convivial tavern-based sociability and extramarital sex. Boswell was not necessarily atypical, and this chapter will explore the fluidity of manhood in his and other elite men's lives in eighteenth-century urban Scotland.

Recent studies of English masculinities during this period have explored libertine, impolite, polite and domestic manhood. These histories highlight significant differences in the performance of ideal manhood manifested by the masculinities of the libertines and bohemians of London, and landed gentlemen and merchants displaying self-control through economic management of household and estate, and fatherly leadership. These and other studies demonstrate that multiple masculinities were available to landed, professional and middling men. This was as true for Scotland as for England, and this chapter will explore the continuum of polite and libertine expressions of manhood in eighteenth-century Scotland through an examination of violence, independence, sexuality and friendship. To do so it will draw on a variety of sources with a focus on men's life writing, a source that offers an entree into their articulation and negotiation of gender identity.

During the eighteenth century, urbanisation and rapid commercial growth combined with emerging discourses of Enlightenment to inform the creation of public spaces in which men and women performed politeness, and engaged in the social processes of improvement. These public spaces included mixed-sex spaces, such as theatres, concert and assembly halls, which were joined by homosocial male spaces, such as societies, clubs, and coffeehouses. Rather than replacing pre-existing institutions, they operated within an integrated public sphere alongside public bodies including the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. In Chapter 3, I will explore the relationship between gender, Enlightenment, and urban culture. This chapter examines the intellectual societies which were the epicentre of Enlightenment thought. Significantly, in Scotland they were male spaces, and this chapter will demonstrate that these homosocial spaces were integral to the performance of male refinement. I argue that although coexisting and integrated with a mixed-sex public sphere, the homosocial associational public sphere was a prime location for intellectual and political participation, and thereby allowed men of elite and upper-middling rank to claim an intellectual and political agency that was denied to women.

In post-Union Scotland, where there was no longer a Scottish Parliament, but the institutions of the Kirk and the law had been retained, it was not parliamentary party politics, but theories of government and society, and questions of commerce and refinement, that dominated political thinking.

A partial presence

Women were neither entirely absent nor fully present in Scottish Enlightenment culture. It would be ludicrous to suggest that women existed in a cloistered domestic sphere, but it is also incorrect to assume that women's public presence equated to a sort of liberation. Women were never invisible in the Enlightenment, but their participation was constrained by gender. Significantly, their inclusion was dependent upon the performance of a femininity that acted to limit the extent of their participation. In Capital of the Mind (2003), a popular history of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, James Buchan asserts that ‘the eighteenth century was the women's century in Scotland’, citing the decline in religious superstition, improvements in public health, increased economic prosperity, and the emergence of domesticity. It is undeniable that certain aspects of eighteenth-century improvement benefited women, but it is a massive leap to claim that it was ‘the women's century’. As the previous chapter illustrated, Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture was largely a male culture. Whatever the changes to a woman's social position in eighteenth-century Scotland, these did not empower her to fully participate in the century's epistemological revolution.

Complex analyses of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on women have been developed by feminist historians, and this chapter follows the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Jane Rendall, who has written extensively on women in Scottish Enlightenment ideology and women's place in intellectual and political life.

Describing the process of social change leading to civility, David Hume wrote in 1752:

For Hume, refined urban sociability, or urbanity, indicated progress, and he uses it to assert European cultural superiority. Offering a Eurocentric vision of ‘barbarous nations’, Hume's depiction of the eighteenth-century European world is also misleading; rather than reading his description of things as they were, his vision needs to be understood as an ideal. It was the striving to reach and defend this ideal that underpinned the culture of improvement, which itself was fostered by Scottish Enlightenment philosophies of progress.

If we limit our view of Enlightenment to a published canon and disregard its social contexts, we ignore the conditions in which ideas were formed and disseminated. We also forfeit the possibility of recognising and understanding the full scope of women's contribution. In this book the Scottish Enlightenment is understood as an often disparate ideological and cultural movement unified by a discourse of improvement.

Improvement should be understood as an imperative to achieve and maintain social progress. This imperative underpinned Scottish Enlightenment thought, not least the philosophy of two of its most influential protagonists, Adam Smith and David Hume. More than a philosophical movement, the epistemological changes wrought by Enlightenment cannot be separated from the economic and social developments that occurred in eighteenth-century Scotland, from the establishment of a theatre in Edinburgh to the building of planned villages in the Highlands.

During the eighteenth century, Scotland experienced massive economic and demographic change. Agricultural modernisation and post-Union access to the markets of the British Empire increased urban commercial wealth and funded early industrialisation. This in turn encouraged urbanisation. In 1750, only one in eight people lived in towns with populations of 10,000 or more, but during the next century Scotland underwent urbanisation at one of the fastest rates in Europe, so that by 1850 one-third of the population lived in towns. These emerging urban centres were key sites for the enactment of a Scottish politics aimed at the economic and moral improvement of Scotland in the context of the country's membership in the British state.

The John Kay sketch that adorns the cover of this book depicts five unnamed people standing on Edinburgh's North Bridge. The men look to each other as if in conversation, while the women stand between them, with one facing away from the viewer. The women appear as listeners rather than as discussants themselves. They are present and yet they are relatively passive. In many respects this image is symbolic of women's place in Scottish Enlightenment culture.

As this book has demonstrated, women did play a part in the Scottish Enlightenment, but it was a peripheral one. They were excluded from the intellectual societies that were crucially important to the development of Enlightenment thinking in Scotland, and this position was the same in other manifestations of the public sphere, especially convivial clubs and their usual home, taverns. As with women elsewhere in eighteenth-century Britain, Scotswomen participated in the Enlightenment in an informal sociable capacity, discussing ideas with male literati over tea and in private correspondence. They were able to do this because female education was not entirely neglected during the eighteenth century and, like men, women had access to Enlightenment ideas via the expanding world of print. Yet, unlike in England, women in Scotland did not make a significant contribution to the world of publication until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was due in part to a close-knit male culture in Edinburgh, with its close connections to the male-defined institutions of the universities and courts, and the lack of opportunities for female intellectual networking compared with that available in London.

On 14 April 1762 the Edinburgh Evening Courant reported that:

This conflict occurred in public, on the streets of Edinburgh at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment. Whereas coffeehouses, intellectual associations, and convivial clubs are emblematic of the Enlightenment project, this incidence of public violence suggests a failure in the processes of refinement.

With this chapter I integrate the history of violent manhood with that of men engaging in polite conversation and debate in a sociable urbane world, and ask what place personal violence had in the performance of elite manhood. The main focus of this chapter is a study of duelling. As an elite male cultural ritual, duelling provides useful insights into the relationship between public honour, violent behaviour, and men's assertion of gentlemanly status. I examine Enlightenment discourses on duelling before moving on to a study of the place of duelling within urban polite society, the duel's function in men's assertion of social status, and the sociable and public functions of the duel. I will conclude with an examination of the impact of Enlightenment discourse on men's understanding of the duel.