Robert Kirk (folklorist)

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Robert Kirk (9 December 1644 – 14 May 1692) was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Secret Commonwealth, a treatise on fairy folklore, witchcraft, ghosts, and second sight, a type of extrasensory perception described as a phenomenon by the people of the Scottish Highlands. Folklorist Stewart Sanderson and mythologist Marina Warner called Kirk's collection of supernatural tales one of the most important and significant works on the subject of fairies and second sight. Christian philosopher and religious studies scholar David Bentley Hart has praised Kirk for writing The Secret Commonwealth to defend "harmless Scottish country folk who innocently dabbled in the lore of their culture" and "found themselves arraigned by Presbyterian courts for practicing the black arts." In the late 1680s, Kirk travelled to London to help publish one of the first translations of the Bible into Scottish Gaelic. Gentleman scientist Robert Boyle financed the publication of the Gaelic...

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