Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

there are undoubtedly numerous gaps in the history of freemasonry, but
to fill them, not by the successful search for new facts, but by the use of
imagination, is to revert to the mythical or imaginative treatment of the
subject. 9
Frequently, freemasonry has become the “happy hunting-ground of
wildly imaginative and uncritical writers.” 10 As a result, more recent
examinations consider its development in varied social and cultural contexts.
One of the most influential works on European freemasonry is Margaret Jacob’s
Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century
Europe (1991). 11 Published ten years after The Radical Enlightenment:
Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (1981), it offers a striking and vivid
account of the rise and development of eighteenth-century European
freemasonry. 12
Furthermore, Jacob raises interesting questions about the origins of the
society and how it changed and evolved after its transportation from Britain to
Europe. She acknowledges that Scottish lodges do contain a wealth of
information that offer brief glimpses of the transition from operative to
speculative – or non-operative – freemasonry. According to Jacob, the richness
of these records and minutes “has led the historian who has worked most
9 Knoop and Jones, The Scope and Method of Masonic History (Oldham, 1944), 9; See also
Stevenson’s Origins, 1-5, for further discussion on the problems of masonic historiography.
10 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 294-295. Margaret Jacob echoes the
claims of Yates, writing that “much of what has been written on Freemasonry is worthless and
every library is filled with non-scholarly literature on the subject,” The Radical Enlightenment:
Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981), 7.
11 Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-
Century Europe, (Oxford, 1991). Also see Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment.
12 See Paul Turnbridge and C. A. Bantham, “The Climate of European Freemasonry 1750-
1810,” AQC, 83(1970). The authors suggest that “the rituals and instructions [from Britain]
were transmitted solely by word of mouth and as a result underwent considerable
modifications,” 248.
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