'I do the best I can for the Advantage of my Country': The Enlightened networks of John Geddes in Spain

Résumé En

In 1770, John Geddes was sent to Madrid in order to recover the Scots College which had been handed over to the Irish on the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain. He became the first Rector of the Scots College at Valladolid and over the next ten years he established impressive networks among the enlightened circles in Spain and in Scotland. In his article on the ‘Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Mark Goldie focused on Geddes’s role in ‘familiarizing Scots with Spain’ once he was back in Scotland. This paper will rather seek to explore Geddes’s eagerness to act as an intermediary between Scottish and Spanish literati while he lived in Valladolid (for instance William Robertson, William Ogilvie and Campomanes), his endeavours to spread the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment in Spain (he translated parts of the Wealth of Nations into Spanish and kept a regular correspondence with the Royal Librarian, Francisco Cerda y Rico) and, more generally, his encouragement of antiquarian initiatives to document the history of pre-Reformation Scotland and of early Scottish Catholic figures. The paper will conclude by attempting to assess the impact of these networks, which embodied the enlightened ideals of the Republic of Letters, on the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Scotland.