Thomas Pennant and Enlightenment Networks
A One-Day Research Workshop, Saturday 12th September,
University of Glasgow
Location: School of Critical Studies, Room 202, 4 University Gardens
Conveners: Prof Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow) and Dr Mary-Ann Constantine
(CAWCS, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Registration for non-speakers £10 (£5 concessions)
You can register at the workshop, but space is limited, so please contact Alex Deans
([log in to unmask]) if you wish to attend.
The Workshop is Part of the four year AHRC-funded research project Curious Travellers:
Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1760-1820 [log in to unmask] based
jointly in CAWCS, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the School of Critical Studies,
University of Glasgow.
By the time of his Scottish (1769 and 1772) and Welsh (1773) tours, Thomas Pennant was
known as a naturalist and the author of British Zoology (1761-66) and Synopsis of
Quadrupeds (1771). He had also established a national and international network of learned
correspondents, including Sir Joseph Banks, Carl Linnaeus, Peter Simon Pallas, Gronovius,
Gilbert White of Selbourne, and Richard Gough. Pennant’s tours are representative of his
omnivorous style and interdisciplinary range: he was a renowned antiquarian and a competent
historian, art critic and agriculturalist as well as a naturalist. Perhaps for this reason, although
frequently cited as witness or authority in other studies, especially on the natural and social
history of Scotland and Wales, his texts have rarely been addressed in their own right.
Pennant’s ambition was to combine the personal authority of the informed traveller’s eye with
the encyclopaedic protocols of enlightenment knowledge making, and his correspondence
reveals the extent to which his travel books were based on a laborious process of data
collection both ‘in the field’, and at his Flintshire home at Downing. Pennant was also the
first domestic traveller to provide extensive visual documentation of his tours, commissioning
(or offering patronage) to artists like Paul Sandby, Charles Cordiner, and most famously, his
‘servant artist’ Moses Griffith. The workshop will address Pennant’s Enlightenment
networks, with a special focus on natural history and antiquarianism, topographical drawing,
and epistolary culture.
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