"We, the miners in this place": Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment

<xo:p>This article addresses a pertinent case example of Popular Enlightenment: Westerkirk Parish Library. Dealing with the social aspect of reading, the argument is a twofold one. First, the library’s minute book reveals practices of what has been called the popularization of the Enlightenment – practices of disseminating Scottish Enlightenment texts and ideas into the larger rural community through the material sharing of books. Second, the article makes a methodological point. It argues that such a study of Westerkirk miners’ library and the founding committee’s minutes requires a media materialist perspective. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and recent reflections on the materiality of the archive, I foreground sources that at first sight do not seem to offer promising footholds for conventional literary scholarship – such as membership lists, accounts of items purchased or damaged, and lists of infractions. The emphasis is thereby placed on notational practices rather than on discourse. As such, I review two autobiographical attempts to frame Westerkirk and the adjacent sister library in Langholm in terms of what I call the ‘Enlightenment master plot’ and propose instead that we regard Westerkirk library as a dynamic archive of books held together by the meticulous actions of reader bureaucrats. Two steps for engaging with this archive are suggested as the interpretative keys for navigating ‘un-discursive’ material such as the Westerkirk minute book: specialization and inscription. Thinking of the minute book’s contents in terms of specialization and inscription forms the clue to understanding how ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment could be put in practice to start a library in an isolated community of antimony miners.</xo:p>