| Sumario: | This essay builds upon recent scholarship addressing the anthropological essays of Anne Macvicar Grant (1755–1838), particularly in relation to her Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811). Permeating Grant's analysis of the supernatural in the text is the sense that she is part of a peculiarly Highland strain of a cultural phenomenon. While the generic requirements of the Essays might encourage the assumption that it sits in Grant's oeuvre as her most determined attempt at an unbiased, scientific, anthropological work, in many regards it is the text that best displays her impassioned, rhetorical campaign for the preservation and perhaps the renaissance of Highland culture. Relating to this issue and responding to modern scholarship, this essay extrapolates upon the general and potentially misleading positioning of the Essays as a 'Scottish' anthropological text. By comparing Grant's attitude to the supernatural in the Essays with Walter Scott's (1771–1832) Anglocentric scepticism, discernible distinctions emerge between responses to tales of spectres in the polite, Enlightenment-inspired Anglophone regions of Scotland, and the treatment of such supernatural occurrences in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland where Enlightenment discourse had not yet become all-prevailing.
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