New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment examines religious belief and practice during the age of Enlightenment from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

Preface

Notes from Many Hands: Pierre Lyonnet’s Redesign of Friedrich Christian Lesser’s Insecto-Theology

Kevin L. Cope

An Apostate Maskil: The Effect of the Haskalah on Daniil Avraamovich Khvol’son

Andrew C. Reed

The Discourse of Civil Religion in M. M. Kheraskov’s Numa Pompilius

Andreas Berg

George Whitefield, John Wesley, and the Rhetoric of Liberty

Glen O’Brien

The Enlightenment in the Historical Imagination of Evangelical and Awakened Protestants in Europe, Britain, and North America, c. 1750–1850

Andrew Kloes

Tale of the Comet: Enlightenment Discourse, the Salem Witch Trials, and the Undoing of Puritan Orthodoxy

Douglass Madison Furrh

“The Glorious Liberty of the Children of God”: Moral Agency and Human Liberty in Samuel Clarke’s Newtonian Theology

Jonathan D. Pike

Facing Forward, Looking Backward: Milton, Dryden, and the Politics of Biblical Interpretation

John J. Burke, Jr.

David Simple, Volume the Last, and Rational Christian Faith

Robin Runia

Repentance or Regret: Isabella’s Religion in The History of the Nun

Lisa Sikkink

The Mémoires of Jean Marteilhe, a Huguenot Galley Slave, in the Age of Enlightenment

Séverine Collignon-Ward

“The Agreeable Contrast”: British Caricatures of the 1745 Jacobite Revolution

Monika Renate Barget

Religion and the Late German Enlightenment: Four New Translations of Schiller and Goethe

Paul E. Kerry

Managing Overseas Missions: The SPCK in the Scilly Islands, 1796–1819

Bob Tennant

Bibliography

Index

Contributors