The first volume of the new Oxford University Press edition of the works of Burns opens with a piece of writing not by Robert but by his father, William. Nigel Leask begins his collection of the Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose with the ‘Manual of Religious Belief’, written circa 1777 by William Burnes with the assistance of his sons’ tutor, John Murdoch. It is a decision that signals a growing recognition of the ‘Manual’ as a starting point for Robert's literary growth, clarifying the environments inhabited by a writer who has often been imperfectly contextualised. Long before Robert's first commonplace book would, in Leask's words, ‘record [his] dawning creativity and poetic self-fashioning’, the ‘Manual’ offers a glimpse of his immersion in the intellectual culture of late eighteenth-century Ayrshire, where the agricultural transformations helping to drive Scotland's Age of Improvement were in full effect. Certainly Murdoch's presence within the Burnes/Burns family is indicative not only of the pious literacy traditionally associated with Scots Presbyterianism, but also of aspirational horizons, though it would be overzealous to locate William among ‘a latent “bourgeois” element’ identified by Devine in the population of tenant farmers. Recounting his life from the vantage of 1787, Robert stressed a moment of upward social mobility – his father, previously a gardener, taking on a small farm – as a generational shift, the sons no longer consigned to be ‘little underlings about a farm-house’. At the same time, this ‘history of Myself’ compassed grammar, folk superstition, literature, history and ‘Polemical divinity’, the last of which the poet highlighted as his pathway to notoriety, having ‘puzzle[d] Calvinism’ as a youth.

Thomas Ahnert is among those to have underscored the theological orientation to the experience of Enlightenment in Scotland. In recent research on the flourishing of booksellers, subscription and to a lesser extent circulating libraries, it is worth emphasising the preponderance of religious and devotional texts in the reading diet in parts of provincial Scotland. That dynamic was certainly present in an Ayrshire society that Burns remembered as ‘half-mad’ with religious disputation.