David Hume

Contents

Acknowledgments

Method of Citation

Introduction: Hume as Historian (Mark G. Spencer)

1 Hume and Ecclesiastical History: Aims and Contexts (Roger L. Emerson)

2 Artificial Lives, Providential History, and the Apparent Limits of Sympathetic Understanding (Jennifer A. Herdt)

3 “The Spirit of Liberty”: Historical Causation and Political Rhetoric in the Age of Hume (Philip Hicks)

4 “The Book Seemed to Sink into Oblivion”: Reading Hume’s History in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Mark Towsey)

5 Reading Hume’s History of England: Audience and Authority in Georgian England (David Allan)

6 Medieval Kingship and the Making of Modern Civility: Hume’s Assessment of Governance in The History of England (Jeffrey M. Suderman)

7 Hume and the End of History (F. L. van Holthoon)

8 David Hume as a Philosopher of History (Claudia M. Schmidt)

9 Fact and Fiction: Memory and Imagination in Hume’s Approach to History and Literature (Timothy M. Costelloe)

10 Hume’s Historiographical Imagination (Douglas Long)

11 The “Most Curious & Important of All Questions of Erudition”: Hume’s Assessment of the Populousness of Ancient Nations (M. A. Box and Michael Silverthorne)

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

“All in all, this is a fine collection of essays, and the editor is to be commended for the selection and especially for the pairing of essays. The collection is a reminder for us of how famous Hume was as an historian and how admired his work was by many more than that Mr. Skiff of Hume, New York, and we get a nice overview, however brief, of the various topics the authors consider, certainly enough to encourage further research on the Histories.”

—Wade L. Robison, Journal of Scottish Philosophy