Richard Hurd and culture

I’m preparing for an essay on the pre-history of historical reenactments in the 18thc. (Don’t ask how I got into this one...it’s way off field...but it’s turning out strangely fascinating....) And in the process I am reading Richard Hurd’s essay on imitation and also his Moral and Political Dialogues, work which is remarkably little known. Hurd was a Anglican parson, who became a bishop, but who had grasped what we might think of the sociological, historicist turn that we usually associate with Scottish enlightenment about the same time as the Edinburgh/Glasgow crowd, if not completely independently. (I’m not entirely clear about influences here.) Hurd is no proponent of sympathy and emulation though: he’s a Lockean not a Shaftesbury person. But the point is: that for him the notion that nature and in particular human nature is uniform (that is, is formed in chains of cause and effects in the same way under different environments or contexts) leads to the embrace of cultural difference rather than it’s elision. (This is to speak our academic language not his.) The reason for this is: all varieties of human society and culture belong to nature (a nature which is basically an expression of God’s will) and none can be written off or demonised as pagan. The other important consequence of this line of thought is to marginalise the classical heritage. Hurd was an associate of those like Thomas Percy, another Anglican parson, who tried to bring the primitive literatures of the world into British circulation at exactly the time he was writing.