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Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly
Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Perhaps it would not be inappropriate to begin with a confession. This is, after all, an annual that focuses on religious topics. In a publication that aims for disciplinary breadth, the majority of the articles in this volume address literary topics. Nonetheless, I do not mean for this confession to be taken as an apology. On the contrary. While RAE publishes representative scholarship from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, the overall quality and coverage of the essays included here recommend this volume to scholars and students of the Enlightenment, no matter their disciplinary background. These essays cover a range …
Jonathan Swift And The Afterlife: Heaven, Hell, Or Maybe Not, James L. Thomas
Jonathan Swift And The Afterlife: Heaven, Hell, Or Maybe Not, James L. Thomas
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Jonathan Swift (1667-17 45) was unequivocally a priest of the Church of Ireland for fifty years but also was, more famously, a great satirist. The apparent contrast between the two conflicting functions (priest and writer of satires) of the late dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral of Dublin has stimulated a great deal of critical discussion during the centuries since his death. Perhaps most prominent among recent contributions to the critical dialogue is Todd Parker's edited volume Swift as Priest and Satirist. Brean Hammond has also devoted quite a bit of space (at least two full chapters) to this internal conflict …
Preaching On The Brink Of Ecclesiastical Change: William Sancroft's Sermon At The Consecration Of Seven Bishops, Advent Sunday, 1660, Martha F. Bowden
Preaching On The Brink Of Ecclesiastical Change: William Sancroft's Sermon At The Consecration Of Seven Bishops, Advent Sunday, 1660, Martha F. Bowden
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
On Advent Sunday, 1660, seven bishops were consecrated in Westminster Abbey. The extraordinary number was made necessary by the anti-episcopal policies of the Parliamentary government of the previous fifteen years; a total of seventeen new bishops were consecrated in England and Wales in the first months of the Restoration. This particular consecration at Westminster Abbey remedied the situation in two Welsh dioceses (William Lucy of St. David's and Hugh Lloyd of Llandaff) and five English ones (John Cosin of Durham, Benjamin Laney of Peterborough, Richard Sterne of Carlisle, Brian Walton of Chester, and John Garden of Exeter). Several of these …
Facing The Future With The Shield Of Aeneas: Virgil And The Testing Of Dryden's Catholic Faith In The 1690s, John J. Burke Jr.
Facing The Future With The Shield Of Aeneas: Virgil And The Testing Of Dryden's Catholic Faith In The 1690s, John J. Burke Jr.
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The shield of Aeneas has always had a sense of mystery about it. His shield, like that of Achilles in the Iliad, is not merely a physical object designed to protect him from crippling wounds or death while in battle; oddly, it is also a work of art. Moreover, it is a work of art that is supernatural in origin, fashioned in this instance by the Roman god Vulcan and presented to the Trojan exile Aeneas by his goddess mother, Venus, in book 8 of Virgil's Aeneid. There have been countless discussions of what we are to make …
''A Prodigious Execution": The Confessional Politics Of Robert Paltock's The Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Patrick Mello
''A Prodigious Execution": The Confessional Politics Of Robert Paltock's The Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Patrick Mello
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The only extant eighteenth-century review of Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1750) compares the novel to both Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Robinson Crusoe (1719), claiming that Paltock attempts to blend qualities of those two books but fails because there is "no very natural conjunction" between them. The reviewer's judgment, however, seems excessively harsh-in fact, positioning Peter Wilkins between these two novels makes a great deal of sense. Like Crusoe, Peter Wilkinsfeatures a reasonable, Whiggish male protagonist who, through labor and solitude, undergoes a spiritual transformation while stranded on a deserted island. What …
Religion, Evolution, And Sensibility: Vico And Hume On The History Of Religion, Horace L. Fairlamb
Religion, Evolution, And Sensibility: Vico And Hume On The History Of Religion, Horace L. Fairlamb
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Whereas Eastern religions are typically defined by their practices, Western religions are identified by their theological histories, beginning with the covenant between God and Abraham. These theological histories chart a cultural progress marked by divine intrusions or revelations. In contrast, modern secular histories suggest that nature, humanity, and knowledge are progressing without the need for supernatural intervention. Moreover, while traditional religions typically claimed that ultimate truth had already been revealed, Enlightenment progressivism holds that truth is not yet absolutely known, that knowledge is still evolving, and that further progress in truth depends only on natural reason. With the coming of …
Wherein Lies Virtue? Secular Matters And Godly Matters In The Works Of Sarah Fielding, Mary Ann Rooks
Wherein Lies Virtue? Secular Matters And Godly Matters In The Works Of Sarah Fielding, Mary Ann Rooks
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Like many writers of the eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding frequently proclaims that the function of her narratives, and of fiction in general, is to inculcate virtue through entertaining storytelling; in her novels she forthrightly intends, as she says in the introduction to The Cry, to "entertain and instruct:' In her prefatory and other critical materials, she tends to draw from an arsenal of commonly referenced classical poets and early modern philosophers, essayists, and literary masters to illustrate and defend her moral purpose. Indeed, one might be led to believe, based solely on reading the ancillary, nonfiction expressions surrounding Fielding's …
The New Pilgrim's Progress, Anglican Longings, And Eighteenth-Century Missionary Fantasies, Laura M. Stevens
The New Pilgrim's Progress, Anglican Longings, And Eighteenth-Century Missionary Fantasies, Laura M. Stevens
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
At its core, this paper is a recovery project, focused on a neglected novel, and so I will begin with a brief plot summary. The New Pilgrim's Progress, or, The Pious Indian Convert, first published in London in 1748, tells the story of its narrator, James Walcot, a young Anglican clergyman who, feeling called to convert the heathens of America, emigrates to Jamaica. There he nearly triggers an uprising by telling slaves that he believes slavery to be unjust. He then sails to Charles Town, South Carolina, where he becomes personal chaplain to a wealthy landowner and assists …
Beautifully Damned: Imagination, Revelation, And Exile In Coleridge's "The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner" And Byron's Cain: A Mystery, Matt Slykhuis
Beautifully Damned: Imagination, Revelation, And Exile In Coleridge's "The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner" And Byron's Cain: A Mystery, Matt Slykhuis
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Abrief survey of the eighteenth-century debates regarding the compatibility of reason and religion reveals the development of two powerful-and polarized-theological trends. The first is what I refer to as the "de-supernaturalization" of Christianity. This movement was evinced among rationalists who desired to remain connected to England's religious past and to retain the unifying influence of their society's most vital "myth" (i.e., Christianity) but who also felt a strong impetus to rid the faith of its "irrational" supernatural elements (e.g., belief in miracles, the soul, and the inspiration of Scripture). The second trend, what I call "re-supernaturalization;' occurred later in the …
Anti~Catholicism And The Gothic Imaginary: The Historical And Literary Contexts, Diane Long Hoeveler
Anti~Catholicism And The Gothic Imaginary: The Historical And Literary Contexts, Diane Long Hoeveler
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
General historical consensus (long in the grip of Whig assumptions) has frequently proclaimed that religion during the Enlightenment period was no longer the highly contentious issue that it had been since the reformation in England. By the mid-eighteenth century, the long siege of fighting and dying over religious beliefs was, in fact, believed to be safely in the past as an elite class and an enlightened bourgeoisie embraced the brave new world of rationalism. This upper crust relegated religious disputes to a much earlier European culture that had been prone to such primitive, superstitious, and irrational behaviors and beliefs. The …
Emptied And Filled: Catherine Livingston Garrettson's Quest For Sanctification, Rachel Cope
Emptied And Filled: Catherine Livingston Garrettson's Quest For Sanctification, Rachel Cope
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In October 1837, Catherine Livingston Garrettson, a devout Methodist and a prolific writer, made note of a personal jubilee in her diary: "This blessed month is near its end and I have been honored to see my 85 years, and the 50 years of my spiritual birth:' Just as 14 October 1752 dated her entrance into mortal life, for Catherine, 13 October 1787 marked an even more meaningful "birthday" -the anniversary of the day she experienced justification and came to desire personal sanctification ( the point in which a believer is transformed and purified through the grace of Christ and …
The Enlightenment Tradition Of Hume And Smith In Austen: Windows To Understanding, Nicole Coonradt
The Enlightenment Tradition Of Hume And Smith In Austen: Windows To Understanding, Nicole Coonradt
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith notes the importance of "little department[s]"-those smaller circles of social contact: "By Nature the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and directions, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most, and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows:' Alasdair MacIntyre would agree with this idea of one's sphere of influence, especially in the works of Jane Austen. Clearly, this concern with self, others, and country might …
P. J. Marshall: The British Discovery Of Hinduism In The Eighteenth Century: Book Review, Michael Austin
P. J. Marshall: The British Discovery Of Hinduism In The Eighteenth Century: Book Review, Michael Austin
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The format of this reissued book deserves some commentary. Originally published in 1970, these reprints of primary texts from the second half of the eighteenth century are now available in a digitally printed version. This publication format takes advantage of new digital printing technologies that can produce attractive, bound volumes of older books-often indistinguishable from the original edition-in print runs as small as a single copy. This publication medium is an exciting innovation for scholars, ultimately eliminating out-of-print books by making any book available, on demand, to anyone who wants to purchase it.
Diesen Kufl Der Ganzen Welt!: Locating German Enlightenment Through The Idea Of Tolerance, Paul E. Kerry
Diesen Kufl Der Ganzen Welt!: Locating German Enlightenment Through The Idea Of Tolerance, Paul E. Kerry
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Where does one find the German Enlightenment? General surveys and otherwise highly serviceable scholarly readers on the Enlightenment tend to neglect it. A recent book on the German Enlightenment by T. J. Reed observes that for many outside Germany, including scholars, the connection Aufklarung und deutsch (Enlightenment and German) is almost paradoxical. Why should this be so? One explanation is that the German Enlightenment is overshadowed by the French Enlightenment. A second explanation is that late-nineteenth-century Germany is associated with a turn away from Enlightenment ideas, in part a countervailing reaction to the terror of the Napoleonic Wars and French …
Patrick Muller: Latitudinarianism And Didacticism In Eighteenth~ Century Literature: Moral Theology In Fielding, Sterne, And Goldsmith: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske
Patrick Muller: Latitudinarianism And Didacticism In Eighteenth~ Century Literature: Moral Theology In Fielding, Sterne, And Goldsmith: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Latitudinarianism is one of those terms modern authors use when discussing disputes within the eighteenth-century Church of England, often without providing a definition of the term itself. Liberal and conservative, Whig and Tory, are unhelpful in identifying a person's place on a religious spectrum that was not necessarily political. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy are germane only when considering debates that crossed denominational lines-or, at the very least, threatened to cause schism. So scholars often use the term "latitudinarian" by default.
Joris Van Eijnatten: Preaching, Sermon, And Cultural Change In The Long Eighteenth Century: Book Review, Anna Battigelli
Joris Van Eijnatten: Preaching, Sermon, And Cultural Change In The Long Eighteenth Century: Book Review, Anna Battigelli
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
For decades, the eighteenth-century sermon has fallen into scholarly neglect, despite its role as the foremost performance of public self-definition. The sermon provides insight into the experience of daily life, evolving national self-definitions, and changing cultural trends. Indeed, it is difficult to absorb the complexity and paradoxes of the period known as the Enlightenment apart from the kinds of sermons it produced. The essays in this volume focus on the eighteenth century and cover all of Europe, casting some needed light on the sermon's theological foundations, its transformation throughout the course of the eighteenth century, its content, and, most interesting, …
Phillip C. Almond Heaven And Hell In Enlightenment England: Book Review, Ryan K. France
Phillip C. Almond Heaven And Hell In Enlightenment England: Book Review, Ryan K. France
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
P hilip C. Almond examines the changing concepts of heaven and hell, and the nature of the human soul, as interpreted in England between the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. This book, originally published in 1994, was greatly influenced by two magisterial studies: Daniel P. Walker's The Decline of Hell (Chicago, 1964) and Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (Oxford, 1997), though unfortunately Almond's primary points of departure and contributions are not especially clear. The final product will appeal to a more narrow audience than the title would suggest, but Almond presents …
William Gibson And Geordan Hammond, Editors Wesley And Methodist Studies, Vol. 2: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio
William Gibson And Geordan Hammond, Editors Wesley And Methodist Studies, Vol. 2: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Wesley and Methodist Studies is a joint venture of the Manchester Wesley Research Centre and the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University. The annual publishes works on John and Charles Wesley, Methodism, and the Evangelical Revival, primarily covering the eighteenth century through the present, though it also considers essays dealing with historical precedents for the Wesleys and their religious movement. Volume 2 contains five articles on the topics of Charles Wesley, the early Methodist use of verbal proclamation, the relationship between Hugh Bourne and William Clowes in Primitive Methodism, and Irish Methodist membership between 1855 and …
Kathryn Duncan, Editor Religion In The Age Of Reason: A Transatlantic Study Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Book Review, David B. Paxman
Kathryn Duncan, Editor Religion In The Age Of Reason: A Transatlantic Study Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Book Review, David B. Paxman
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
When asked what would follow race, class, and gender as the new "center of intellectual energy in the academy:' Stanley Fish answered, "religion" (ix). Kathryn Duncan's collection of twelve essays in Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century turns our attention in that direction and, in so doing, demonstrates why religion merits greater attention. Six of the twelve essays have appeared in an issue of AMS's Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, volume 4, edited by Duncan.
Gil Skidmore, Editor Strength In Weakness: Writings Of Eighteenth~ Century Quaker Women: Book Review, Laura Miller
Gil Skidmore, Editor Strength In Weakness: Writings Of Eighteenth~ Century Quaker Women: Book Review, Laura Miller
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
This anthology showcases the experience of an underrepresented group of women: eighteenth-century Quakers. This group has received comparatively little critical attention in contrast to Quaker women of the seventeenth century; Skidmore's anthology helps to fill this void. Skidmore's edition begins with an introductory chapter that helps to define Quakerisms origins, the value of testimony, and the comparative equality of women who participated in a faith that acknowledged "the 'priesthood of all believers'" (2). The eight women whose writings Skidmore anthologizes have lives full of mobility and agency and were, these accounts imply, respected members of their communities. Following is a …
Daniel Brewer: The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth, Century French Thought: Book Review, Charles T. Wolfe, Veronica Ganora
Daniel Brewer: The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth, Century French Thought: Book Review, Charles T. Wolfe, Veronica Ganora
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Daniel Brewer's study of the French Enlightenment-its construction, its self-fashioning, and its subsequent reconstruction in a series of national memorial performancesis heavily overladen with a kind of "poetics of ruins:' Ruins and monuments are everywhere here, in an almost dialectical relation: ''Alas, more beautiful is the debris of a beautiful palace;' exclaims Victor Hugo (quoted p. 186), and Chapter 9, which is explicitly devoted to the theme of ruins, refers to some of the classical Enlightenment narratives of progress, from Condorcet to Turgot, as self-consciously focused on the problem of "building on ruins:' The reference to the past in the …
Jason E. Vickers Wesley: A Guide For The Perplexed: Book Review, Richard P. Heitzenrater
Jason E. Vickers Wesley: A Guide For The Perplexed: Book Review, Richard P. Heitzenrater
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Attempts to analyze John Wesley seriously will sooner or later (probably sooner) result in growing perplexity in the minds of the analysts. There are two main reasons for their consternation. First, difficulties naturally arise from trying to understand a person who was a major national figure during much of his life over two centuries ago. Wesley's was a long life marked by growth, development, change, arguments against opponents from all sides (in different ways at different times and places), and his status as legend in his own day-a reputation that was, in part, of his own doing. Second, the variety …
Robert D. Cornwall And William Gibson, Editors: Religion, Politics, And Dissent, 1660-1832: Essays In Honour Of James E. Bradley: Book Review, Dustin D. Stewart
Robert D. Cornwall And William Gibson, Editors: Religion, Politics, And Dissent, 1660-1832: Essays In Honour Of James E. Bradley: Book Review, Dustin D. Stewart
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
I n reviewing a Festschrift, one shouldn't lose sight of the volume and focus overmuch on the work of its dedicatee. The success of a party is the responsibility of the hosts rather than the guest of honor. Yet for a certain kind of honoree one may well expect a certain kind of party, so the relationship between the honored work and the honoring work demands attention. The editors of Religion, Politics and Dissentbegin their book by depicting James E. Bradley, whose sixty-fifth birthday occasioned the collection, as an opponent of what they call "the dominant historical position" …
Daniella Kostroun And Lisa Vollendorf, Editors Women, Religion, And The Atlantic World (1600-1800): Book Review, Robin Runia
Daniella Kostroun And Lisa Vollendorf, Editors Women, Religion, And The Atlantic World (1600-1800): Book Review, Robin Runia
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
This recent collection of essays promises to transcend the Old vs. New World, Catholic vs. Protestant, and European vs. indigenous dichotomies that have dominated the emerging field of Atlantic studies. Edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf and drawing from a colloquium sponsored by UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600-1800)explores how religion and spirituality shaped local politics, economics, gender, and race in Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America. The alternative directions described and modeled in the volume all assume a women's and …
Jeffrey D. Burson The Rise And Fall Of Theological Enlightenment: Book Review, Kevin L. Cope
Jeffrey D. Burson The Rise And Fall Of Theological Enlightenment: Book Review, Kevin L. Cope
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
A peculiar artifact of many decades of materialist historical study is the reinforcement of a highly imaginary, cinematic envisioning of the French eighteenth century. Eager to debunk, demythologize, or otherwise demote anything even remotely religious, historians relish pictures of the French Enlightenment and French Revolution worthy of a Cecil B. DeMille or a D. W Griffith. In the rendering of continental Enlightenment now favored among fashion-forward academic professionals, the poor, the intellectual, the oppressed, and the angry increase in number and fervor while the overfed monks, the ermine-draped clerics, and the impudent aristocrats gobble up every last resource. Then, in …