FORTUITOUS HAPPENSTANCE: Serendipity in Archival Research

In 1754, Horace Walpole coined the term “serendipity”—a combination of “accidents and sagacity” that leads to great discoveries one never anticipated. I like tracing “serendipity” to the eighteenth century, since much of my work is grounded in that period. My investigations of revolutionary Scottish educator George Jardine, who taught moral philosophy classes at the University of Glasgow for more than fifty years (1774–1827), illustrate both Walpole’s definition of “serendipity” and co-editors Goggin and Goggin’s focus in this collection on interdisciplinary instances of serendipity. Lawyer and archivist Michael H. Hoeflich stresses lessons learned from interdisciplinary examples of spectacular archival