English Language and Literature Commons^™

Telescopes, Microscopes, And The Problem Of Evil, Christopher Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Astronomers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries found themselves for a while at the center of an alignment of scientific, cultural, and religious curiosity. Theirs was an endeavor embraced by significant segments of the established churches of England and Ireland who supported the founding of scientific societies in both countries and who drew on their network of contacts with continental Protestants to keep abreast of current developments abroad. In England, for example, works such as the Reverend William Derham's Astro-theology drew on mounting evidence that the universe might well be far larger than could be imagined to raise …

"Oppressed With My Own Sensations": The Histories Of Some Of The Penitents And Principled Piety, Robin Runia

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Many scholars have observed the sentimentalization of the prostitute throughout the eighteenth century, and while this sentimentalization and its connection to the culture of sensibility have been compellingly theorized, the penitent prostitute's relationship to emotion, sensation, and piety has not been fully developed. The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) constructs an anxious equivalency between emotion and sensation, reflecting the vexed nature of sentimental discourse-the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between sensibility and sensuality. Examining this slippage reveals anxieties about women's abilities to accurately interpret and act upon the sensations of their bodies and their corresponding …

Of Broomsticks, The "Moderns;' And Self-Expression, Nathalie Zimpfer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Broomsticks have a history of making their way into Jonathan Swift's works. One might recall that such is the object of Peter's theologico-interpretive rantings in A Tale of a Tub, in which "after some pause the Brother so often mentioned for his Erudition, who was very skill'd in Criticisms, had found in a certain Author, which he said should be nameless, that the same Word which in the Will is called Fringe, does also signify Broom-stick." More conspicuously, said object is also at the heart of A Meditation upon a Broomstick, an amusing opuscule whose full title, A …

Sentimentality In The Service Of Methodism: John Wesley's Abridgment Of Henry Brooke's The Fool Of Quality ( 17 65-1770), Mary Peace

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This article examines the relationship between Methodist and sentimental discourses in the second half of the eighteenth century through the lens of John Wesley's abridgment of Henry Brooke's sentimental novel The Fool of Quality (1765-70). John Wesley's abridgment was published in 1781 under the title the History of Henry Earl of Moreland. My article is driven by the question of how a worldly Enlightenment text such as Brooke's Fool might have seemed ripe for the propagation of a Methodist theology that had abandoned the possibility of any true virtue existing in the world. In considering the relationship between Brooke's …

Melancholy, Medicine, And Religion In Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy Of Melancholy: Book Review, Samara Anne Cahill

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (2010), Mary Ann Lund challenges what she sees as the excesses, on one hand, of attempting to shoehorn Robert Burton's idiosyncratic text into a single genre and, on the other, of reader-response interpretations of the Anatomy. Lund tackles the Anatomy's notorious unwieldiness by treating the text as a guidebook intended to combat all types of melancholy for any type of reader. In other words, the excessiveness of the Anatomy's form suggests the generosity of an author and pastor who sought to help everyone, …

Milton In Context: Book Review, Angela Eward-Mangione

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

John Milton evades literary categorization more than any of his early modern contemporaries. William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe primarily elicited fame through their contributions to English drama and poetry. John Donne is recognized as a master of both the sonnet and the sermon, though his love poetry remains a significant object of study as well. Milton, however, who wrote primarily as a poet and a pamphleteer, also worked as a government employee, actively engaging his social and political circumstances perhaps more than any other literary writer in early modern England. Milton's activism later led T. S. Eliot, when repenting his …

Theatre Of Crisis: The Performance Of Power In The Kingdom ·Of Ireland, 1662-1692: Book Review, Dave Mcginnis

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Patrick Tuite's book Theatre of Crisis ostensibly details the political and social underpinnings of play development and performative aesthetics in Ireland between 1662 and 1692. From a purely historical point of view, this alone would merit the writing of the text as a point of serious study since Irish drama has traditionally lagged behind its English counterpart, even during the very years on which Tuite focuses. In pursuing this subject, Tuite has crafted a text that not only encapsulates the aesthetic preferences of the relevant era on Ireland's dominant stage at the time, the Smock Alley Theatre, but he has …

''A Dreadful Phenomenon At The Birches": Grace, Nature, And Industry In The Ministry And Writings Of John Fletcher Of Madeley, Peter S. Forsaith

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

n the morning of Thursday, May 27, 1773, the evangelical Vicar of Madeley, Shropshire, the Reverend John Fletcher, went with throngs of other curious onlookers to view the dramatic scene of a landslip that had occurred in the early hours on the edge of his parish, at a location known locally as "the Birches." Meeting several of his parishioners there, he announced that he would return the following evening to preach a sermon on this "Dreadful Phenomenon:' He took for his text "If the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up ... …

"This Interesting Female Shone As The Morning Star": Protestant Missions, American Indian Schoolgirls, And The Rhetoric Of True Womanhood, Elizabeth J. Thompson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

During the settlement era of the English colonies in North America, narratives that expressed hopefulness about the assimilation of Indians often did so through tropes of intermarriage. From William Byrd to Thomas Jefferson, writers fantasized that the most obvious, effective, and nonviolent solution to the ongoing Indian problem could have been-even should have been-intermarriage. Writers, however, seldom suggested their contemporary readers actually seize on this solution. Instead, the overwhelming majority cast such panaceas in the distant past, while a few imagined them taking place in the remote future. Almost all of them ignored actual intermarriage taking place between white men …

Sermon Publishing, Clerical Reading, And John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, 1646-1750, Rosemary Dixon

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Francis Bacon had little to say about the study of divinity in The Advancement of Learning (1605), his critical survey of the state of knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century. In contrast to the other fields of learning Bacon explored, divinity needed but little encouragement: "For I can finde no space or ground that lieth vacant and vnsowne in the matter of Diuinitie, so diligent haue men beene, either in sowing of good seede, or in sowing of Tares:' Bacon did, however, have an intriguing suggestion for a hypothetical theological book:

that forme of writing in Diuinitie, which …

Leibniz And China: Religion, Hermeneutics, And Enlightenment, Eric Sean Nelson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is not typically seen as having formulated a "hermeneutics;' or as being a "hermeneutical thinker;' despite his discussions of the art of interpretation and his influence on the development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hermeneutics in Germany. Nonetheless, many of his works involve issues of how best to interpret texts and other persons. His voluminous writings thus contain-at least implicitly-a hermeneutics, or art of understanding signs, through his practice of interpretation. Furthermore, hermeneutical concerns are prevalent in a number of Leibniz's international projects. Through various philosophical and practical endeavors, Leibniz attempted to reconcile conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable arguments …

On The Good Name Of The Dead: Peace, Liberty, And Empire In Robert Morehead's Waterloo Sermon, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On Sunday, July 2, 1815, a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, the Scottish Episcopalian minister Robert Morehead ( 1777-1842) preached a sermon- On the Good Name of the Dead [Ecclesiastes 7:1]-which displayed many of the components of a theory of Christian empire and combined them with the radically new approach to pulpit oratory that Morehead was helping to develop. The present essay offers a method of exploring the connection between ideology and rhetoric based on tools belonging to linguistic analysis rather than conventional historiography. Thus it is hoped that the evidential base available to historians may be extended. …

Irish Clergy And The Deist Controversy: Two Episodes In The Early British Enlightenment, Scott Breuninger

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D uring the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an important question facing Anglican divines was the relationship between reason and religion. Initiated by the publication of John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), the controversy concerning deism raged across both sides of the Irish Sea and called into question the sanctity of revealed religion, forcing believers to articulate more "rational" defenses of Christianity. Closely associated with the problematic origins of the "English Enlightenment;' Toland's provocative tract valorized reason in matters of religion and drew heavily upon the ideas of natural philosophy. Although viciously attacked for its heretical tenets, Toland's position …

Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, And Theologian: Book Review, Michael Austin

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I n two hundred or so published works between 17 60 and his death in 1804, Joseph Priestley established himself as an important voice in more than a half a dozen important fields. He was a grammarian and pedagogue, philosopher and political theorist, historian, world famous scientist who played a major part in the discovery of oxygen, and important figure in the development of Unitarianism. Covering all of this in a single introductory volume is a big job, and Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian does it well, providing a much needed introduction to the thought of one of the …

A Companion To Hume: Book Review, Eva Dadlez

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Blackwell's fortieth Companion to Philosophy is a splendid and long-overdue Companion to Hume, expertly pulled together by Elizabeth Radcliffe, a former editor of the journal Hume Studies. Although the Blackwell Companions are promoted as a student reference series, this particular volume is clearly of considerable value to serious scholars as well and probably accessible only to advanced students with a strong philosophical background.

Religion, Reform, And Modernity In The Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker And The Church Of England: Book Review, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Thomas Secker was born in 1693 into a Dissenting family, joined the Church of England in his early twenties, and ultimately served as Archbishop of Canterbury, from 1758 until his death in 1768-the last one to head the communion in an undivided Anglophone political community. Robert Ingram has produced an impressively organized account of his personal and, especially public, life with an unprecedented breadth of research and reading. He has also done it with an obvious, indeed, self-confessed, enthusiasm for his subject and in a free-flowing (though sometimes disconcertingly breezy) style that is a pleasure to read, although the prose …

Monarchy And Religion: The Transformation Of The Royal Culture In Eighteenth-Century Europe: Book Review, Kathleen E. Urda

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Originating with a 2002 international conference given by the German Historical Institute London, this fine collection of essays edited by Michael Schaich seeks to challenge and complicate an enduring master narrative about the eighteenth century "as a period of desacralization of monarchy". Schaich states in his introduction that Monarchy and Religion is not a "revisionist" attempt to suggest that religion remained the only or even the main source of monarchy's power and influence in the eighteenth century. Rather, Schaich excellently delineates gaps that have existed for far too long in the portrayal of the European monarchy. He argues in his …