Rev. James Fraser, 1634-1709

An impressively researched and lively biographical study of polymath and polyglot Reverend James Fraser, Gaelic minister of Kirkhill: traveller, historian, linguist, scientist. This book provides a critically important picture of the integration of the later seventeenth-century cultural and intellectual world of the Highlands with that of early modern Europe.

David Worthington's passionate commitment, both to the study of history and to the mission of the UHI, underlies his book, which is not so much a biography as a biographical-based study intended to illuminate a neglected feature of the ‘Early Modern Highlands’: a region which ‘maverick, exceptional scholars, those with curious minds, were not always forced to abandon in order to make their mark on the world’.

Out of the seventeenth-century Highlands, often thought a place apart, steps a determinedly cosmopolitan individual. David Worthington’s study of James Fraser – Gael, linguist, scientist, historian, continent-wide traveller and locally rooted parish minister – is a masterly portrayal of a well lived and productive Highland life.

This excellent new book uses the fascinating life and times of Rev. James Fraser (1634–1709) to illustrate the Scottish Highlands' strong interaction and engagement with the rest of Europe and the burgeoning British Empire. This eminently readable, well-researched book provides a tour of Scotland through the eyes of Rev. Fraser, showing it as a vital, interconnected part of the British Empire and Europe before the Battle of Culloden, thus refuting the common and lazy narrative of the Highlands as a remote, backward region. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty.

This book is required reading for anyone wishing to understand life in the northern Highlands, especially during the second half of the seventeenth century.

Worthington’s portrayal of James Fraser offers a comprehensive view of this multifaceted individual and the world he inhabited. This book also dispels the perception, still far from absent among historians of eighteenth-century Scotland, that the Highlands in the pre-Culloden era should be considered peripheral or isolated from the rest of the world.

The book is wholly successful in its aim to show the Highlands as a meeting point for early modern cultures… ...Worthington’s work reminds us of the complexity of early modern identity and how the Scottish Highlands served as a busy hub of intellectual and cultural relationships.