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Of Broomsticks, The "Moderns;' And Self-Expression, Nathalie Zimpfer Jan 2014

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 …


Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St. Jan 2014

Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St.

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I t is a tragedy for the investigating intellect to have both its own resilience and the power to lift itself to something higher chained when it attempts to track the progress of human knowledge in the annals of the world, the shaping of the intellect, and the refinement of morals. The scholar is fettered in his desire to collect data, which contributed to the enlightenment of nations and which, so to speak, fermented the human mind so that it was able to lift itself up into higher regions and throw off prejudices. He is hindered in his work when …


Index Jan 2014

Index

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.


Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly Jan 2014

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The first five articles in this volume represent a special section devoted to Eastern and Middle Eastern religions during the Enlightenment. These articles do not so much explore these religions on their own terms as consider how Western thinkers and writers responded to Buddhism, Islam, and other non-European religions; they examine how the religious and philosophical thought of the Far and Middle East, or at least the ways Western writers represented this thought, informed Enlightenment ideas and European religious, cultural, and textual practices. As they point out, non-Western religions often served as a lens through which individuals during the long …


Contents Jan 2014

Contents

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.


Buddhism As Caricature: China And The Legitimation Of Natural Religion In The Enlightenment, Jeffery D. Burson Jan 2014

Buddhism As Caricature: China And The Legitimation Of Natural Religion In The Enlightenment, Jeffery D. Burson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Europe was unusually familiar with the ancient civilizations of East Asia, but however familiar China may have seemed, European missionaries and those who utilized and subverted their accounts in the literature of the eighteenth century made sense of China through their own hermeneutical lenses. David Porter's work Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europeargues that Jesuit missionaries and Enlightenment philosophers imposed upon China their Eurocentric quest for "representational legitimacy;' which Porter defines as "the presence of an originary wellspring of meaning that gives rise to a succession of grounded signifiers in which the living image of the origin …


An Introduction To Ignaz Edler Von Born And His Article "Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians", Hans-Wilhelm Kelling Jan 2014

An Introduction To Ignaz Edler Von Born And His Article "Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians", Hans-Wilhelm Kelling

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Although well known during his own lifetime as a scientist, author, and promoter of Enlightenment ideals, Ignaz Edler von Born also made a significant impact in his less public life as a Freemason. In 1784 he was both Meister vom Stuhl of the Masonic Lodge "Zur wahren Eintracht" and editor in chief of the Journal fur Freymaurer, published quarterly for just three years by Christian Friedrich Wappler in Vienna. In its very first issue, Born, under the initials I.v.B.M.v.St., Ignaz von Born, Meister vom Stuhl, contributed an article important to the Freemasons titled "Ueber die Mysterien der Aegyptier:" In …


Wesley And Methodist Studies: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio Jan 2014

Wesley And Methodist Studies: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Wesley and Methodist Studies once again provides carefully researched, worthwhile material demonstrating the important niche that the annual occupies. The word niche seems more applicable to volume 3 than to volume 2. This is certainly not a complaint or a criticism, but the primary articles of volume 3 are highly specialized and less likely to attract a wide audience. Clearly, the title of the annual alerts readers to its specialization, but some of the authors could have framed their arguments to show the reader the bigger picture instead of, for example, offering conclusions that summarize.


Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby Jan 2014

Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I f one were to undertake a genealogy of how Western Europe established a concept of otherness, the eighteenth century would be one of the most rewarding "information hubs" for such a study. Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology, and other new knowledge fields exploring global populations and environs were founded in this century, analyzing and systematizing the waves of travel reports that had been flooding Europe since the time of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Stories and images of paradisiacal and terrorizing spaces, peculiar humans, and wondrous animals and plants had taken root in the Western imagination beginning in the sixteenth century. …


The Eighteenth-Century Novel And The Secularization Of Ethics: Book Review, Mary Ann Rooks Jan 2014

The Eighteenth-Century Novel And The Secularization Of Ethics: Book Review, Mary Ann Rooks

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

For many reasons-including religious reforms and controversies, doubts about the effectiveness of the clergy, the development of scientific advancements and Enlightenment ideologies, and disruptions of class and gender expectations coinciding with the emergence of a consumer economy-it is easy to imagine writers and readers in the eighteenth century searching for a locus of moral authority. The frequency of claims to "entertain and instruct;' a mantra of eighteenth-century prose fiction, indicates a need felt by many authors to address the suspected dangers of novel reading and defend the legitimacy-in part_icular the moral efficacy-of this emergent genre. In The Eighteenth-Century Novel and …


Sentimentality In The Service Of Methodism: John Wesley's Abridgment Of Henry Brooke's The Fool Of Quality ( 17 65-1770), Mary Peace Jan 2014

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 …


"Oppressed With My Own Sensations": The Histories Of Some Of The Penitents And Principled Piety, Robin Runia Jan 2014

"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 …


"Conversing With Animal Forms Of Wisdom'': Blake's Visions Of Eternity In Context, Judith C. Mueller Jan 2014

"Conversing With Animal Forms Of Wisdom'': Blake's Visions Of Eternity In Context, Judith C. Mueller

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Had anyone been paying attention, the endings of Blake's major prophecies-Milton, The Four Zoas, and Jerusalem-might have either puzzled or appalled Blake's Christian contemporaries. Each ends in a movement out of the fractured, fallen state and, in the case of The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, into the promised, eternal paradise, if only for a brief glimpse. Blake's visions of the restored or "heavenly" state respond to common eighteenth-century Christian depictions of the afterlife, most of which he treats with suspicion, even disdain. Scholars have shown how conceptions of heaven shift during the period; theocentric eternities of …


Full Issue Jan 2014

Full Issue

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.


''A Dreadful Phenomenon At The Birches": Grace, Nature, And Industry In The Ministry And Writings Of John Fletcher Of Madeley, Peter S. Forsaith Jan 2014

''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 ... …


Religion And The Politics Of Time: Holidays In France From Louis Xiv Through Napoleon: Book Review, Muriel Schmid Jan 2014

Religion And The Politics Of Time: Holidays In France From Louis Xiv Through Napoleon: Book Review, Muriel Schmid

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As the full title indicates, Religion and the Politics of Time is organized chronologically and presents the evolution of the organization of time in France from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. The style of this historical inquiry is very much reminiscent of Michel Vovelle's or Bernard Plongeron's publications on eighteenth-century revolutionary France, both of which are similarly based on extensive archival research. One of the stated goals of the book is "to reexamine the republican calendar in a long-term framework'' (5). Looking at the history that immediately precedes and follows the creation of the republican calendar …


Front Matter Jan 2014

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.


Global And Local Perspectives In Spanish And New World Performances Of Calderon's Four Parts Of The World, Beth K. Aracena Jan 2014

Global And Local Perspectives In Spanish And New World Performances Of Calderon's Four Parts Of The World, Beth K. Aracena

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The first published collection of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's autos sacramentales(sacred dramas) dates from 1677, during Calderon's lifetime (1600-1681), and includes an explanation of the works penned by this great Spanish dramaturge. In his preface, recognizing that readers may be annoyed at similarities in the printed repertoire of more than seventy autos, Calderon justifies the collection: "The autos were performed but once [sic] a year, and this volume contains works which were produced at intervals over a period of more than twenty years. They were not written to be printed together and read one after another:" Calderon also …


Living With Religious Diversity In Early Modern Europe: Book Review, Michael Mclaughlin Jan 2014

Living With Religious Diversity In Early Modern Europe: Book Review, Michael Mclaughlin

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This volume, consisting of many different approaches to religious diversity and religious coexistence, is part of the extensive series St. Andrews' Studies in Reformation History and is the successful product of a conference on religious diversity held at Carl von Ossietzky Universitat (Oldenberg, Germany) in September 2007. An introduction by C. Scott Dixon and a concluding attempt to theorize religious diversity by Mark Greengrass frame the volume.


William Gibson And Geordan Hammond, Editors Wesley And Methodist Studies, Vol. 2: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio Jan 2012

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 …


Jonathan Swift And The Afterlife: Heaven, Hell, Or Maybe Not, James L. Thomas Jan 2012

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 …


Emptied And Filled: Catherine Livingston Garrettson's Quest For Sanctification, Rachel Cope Jan 2012

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 …


''A Prodigious Execution": The Confessional Politics Of Robert Paltock's The Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Patrick Mello Jan 2012

''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 …


Jeffrey D. Burson The Rise And Fall Of Theological Enlightenment: Book Review, Kevin L. Cope Jan 2012

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 …


Diesen Kufl Der Ganzen Welt!: Locating German Enlightenment Through The Idea Of Tolerance, Paul E. Kerry Jan 2012

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 …


Phillip C. Almond Heaven And Hell In Enlightenment England: Book Review, Ryan K. France Jan 2012

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 …


Preaching On The Brink Of Ecclesiastical Change: William Sancroft's Sermon At The Consecration Of Seven Bishops, Advent Sunday, 1660, Martha F. Bowden Jan 2012

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 …


The New Pilgrim's Progress, Anglican Longings, And Eighteenth-Century Missionary Fantasies, Laura M. Stevens Jan 2012

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 …


Gil Skidmore, Editor Strength In Weakness: Writings Of Eighteenth~ Century Quaker Women: Book Review, Laura Miller Jan 2012

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 Jan 2012

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 …