Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

Concentrating solely on Scottish organizations and furthering Arthur
Williamson’s view that freemasonry ultimately emerged from “Scottish culture
and social self-consciousness,” 17 Davis D. McElroy’s Scotland’s Age of
Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies
(1969) is an invaluable resource for a general study of the abundant
organizations in Scotland during the Enlightenment. 18 McElroy’s research is a
central part of this thesis, as it provides a broad contextual basis for the
discussion of the wider patterns of voluntarism associated with eighteenth-
century Scottish freemasonry.
Not confined exclusively to Scotland, Peter Clark examines numerous
clubs throughout Britain. In his book British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800:
The Origins of an Associational World (2000), 19 Clark approaches the
associational world from several different angles. He explores the reasons for
joining a club and the cultural and social needs and expectations that they
served, and considers how the nature of these societies changed over the course
of two centuries. There is a section on English freemasonry that provides
general membership analyses of masonic lodges and follows their growth and
expansion throughout the eighteenth century.
Central to any analysis of freemasonry is its relation to other groups.
Radical organizations, though, comprise a different strand of topics, as these
17
Arthur H. Williamson, “Number and National Consciousness: The Edinburgh Mathematicians
and Scottish Political Culture at the Union of the Crowns,” in Scots and Britons: Scottish
Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A Mason, (New York, 1994), 188-212.
18
Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary
Clubs and Societies (Washington, 1969).
19
Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World
(Oxford, 2000).
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