Introduction

I was imployed in a diversion of another nature, such as optical secrets, mysteries of natural philosophic, reasons for the variety of colours, the finding out of the longitude, the squaring of a circle, and wayes to accomplish all trigonometrical calculations by sines, without tangents …

The Highlands produced polymaths as well as polyglots in the age before Culloden. This 1653 quotation, from Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, hints at the intellectual potential of the region in an era before it had its own scholarly clubs, societies or ‘associational culture’. Urquhart was referring not to a metropolitan laboratory or royal court but to his own research space at home in his ‘little town’ of Cromarty, just 20 miles north-east of Kirkhill, where he hoped to create a dynamic, multidisciplinary research and educational community. However, while Urquhart eventually had to leave, effective cultivation of local and broader scholarly, travelling and ministerial networks allowed James Fraser, even while at home, to be part of that diverse, mercurial but recognisably seventeenth-century body who Laurence Brockliss has referred to as ‘the curious’. This was a conglomeration of seventeenth-century virtuosos, scattered across Europe, who sought influence ‘irrespective of confessional allegiance’ and who communicated to their friends, students and, in some cases, congregations what some modern scholars still refer to as the ‘Scientific Revolution’. In the Highlands, its representatives, besides the rather transient Urquhart or Robert Gordon, comprised a somewhat amorphous body of luminaries, one which finds some early expression in the activities of cartographer Timothy Pont (fl.1574–1611), while he was minister in Dunnet, Caithness, or, at the other end of the spectrum, Robert Kirk. Another Highland erudite of the time, Martin Martin, is perhaps closer to Fraser, as a well-connected fellow native speaker of Gaelic, and a scholar with the ability to enthuse his contacts and patrons across the Stuart kingdoms and beyond, as an authority to them on all that seemed unfamiliar, bizarre or intriguing about the region rather than its more prosaic qualities, in which they took much less interest.