Miracles in Enlightenment England
Title | Miracles in Enlightenment England PDF eBook |
Author | Jane Shaw |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 264 |
Release | 2006-01-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9780300112726 |
The Enlightenment, considered an age of rationalism, is not normally associated with miracles. In this intriguing book, however, Jane Shaw presents accounts of inscrutable miracles that occurred to ordinary worshippers in early modern England. She considers the reactions of intellectuals, scientists, and physicians to these miraculous events and through them explores the relations between popular and elite culture of the time. Miraculous events in England between the 1650s and the 1750s were experienced mainly not by Catholics, but by Protestants. The book looks at the political and social context of these events as well as interpretations and explanations of them by scientists, the Court, and the Church, as well as by preachers, pamphleteers, friends, and neighbors. Shaw links the lived religion of the time to intellectual history and amends the hitherto received view. The religious practice of ordinary people was as crucial to the development of Enlightenment thought as the philosophical and theological writings of the elite.
Popular and Elite Understandings of Miracles in Enlightened England
Title | Popular and Elite Understandings of Miracles in Enlightened England PDF eBook |
Author | Wilfred Graves |
Publisher | |
Pages | 588 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | England |
ISBN |
This dissertation investigates the issue of miracles in the Anglophone world of much of the long eighteenth century and contributes to our understanding of how people of various social backgrounds understood and debated the meaning of these phenomena. It seeks to establish that the common assumption of this period as one of thorough secularization is incorrect. Chapter 1 reviews the issues involved in the study of miracles, popular-elite religion, secularization, and Enlightenment in England. Chapter 2 lays out the political, social, intellectual, and religious context in which discussions about the supernatural occurred in the late seventeenth century. Chapter 3 deals with a number of reported seventeenth-century miracles from both inside and outside the Anglican Church. Chapter 4 extends the discussion of the supernatural through the first half of the eighteenth century. The literature of the period typically was not hostile toward the idea of the miraculous, although many Protestant leaders believed in the cessation of miracles beyond the New Testament occurrences. The most vicious attacks on miracles at the time were from the Deists. However, Orthodox apologists ably defended foundational Christian tenets against deistic assaults. Reported miracles continued to retain an important place among the populace. Chapter 5 focuses on the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival. A close examination of primary sources, especially John Wesley's Journal, uncovers many supernatural accounts of physical healings, exorcisms, prophecies, and "falling down." These phenomena. which were recorded well into the latter half of the eighteenth century, present a notable contrast to the cessationism taught by some church leaders and reveal that eighteenth-century popular religious practice often transcended prescribed religion. Chapter 6 explores the classic attack on miracles by David Hume and presents various responses to both Humean and deistic arguments. II also looks at discussions about the supernatural during the latter years of the eighteenth century in England. Apparently, belief in miracles survived the storm of the preceding decades. This dissertation affirms the vitality of religious belief and practice in Enlightened England and concludes that thorough secularization and de-Christianization did not occur during the period under consideration. The most that can be claimed is partial secularization.
The Miraculous Body and Other Rational Wonders
Title | The Miraculous Body and Other Rational Wonders PDF eBook |
Author | Jane Alison Shaw |
Publisher | |
Pages | 476 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | England |
ISBN |
Enlightening enthusiasm
Title | Enlightening enthusiasm PDF eBook |
Author | Lionel Laborie |
Publisher | Manchester University Press |
Pages | 288 |
Release | 2015-10-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1784996637 |
In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book concentrates on the notorious case of the French Prophets as the epitome of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. Based on new archival research, it retraces the formation, development and evolution of their movement and sheds new light on key contemporary issues such as millenarianism, censorship and the press, blasphemy, dissent and toleration, and madness.
Enlightenment and Modernity
Title | Enlightenment and Modernity PDF eBook |
Author | Wayne Hudson |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 240 |
Release | 2015-09-30 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317316061 |
The writers known as the English deists were not simply religious controversialists, but agents of reform who contributed to the emergence of modernity. This title claims that these writers advocated a failed ideology which itself declined after 1730. It argues for an evolution of their ideas into a more modern form.
Atheism and Deism Revalued
Title | Atheism and Deism Revalued PDF eBook |
Author | Wayne Hudson |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2016-04-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317177584 |
Given the central role played by religion in early-modern Britain, it is perhaps surprising that historians have not always paid close attention to the shifting and nuanced subtleties of terms used in religious controversies. In this collection particular attention is focussed upon two of the most contentious of these terms: ’atheism’ and ’deism’, terms that have shaped significant parts of the scholarship on the Enlightenment. This volume argues that in the seventeenth and eighteenth century atheism and deism involved fine distinctions that have not always been preserved by later scholars. The original deployment and usage of these terms were often more complicated than much of the historical scholarship suggests. Indeed, in much of the literature static definitions are often taken for granted, resulting in depictions of the past constructed upon anachronistic assumptions. Offering reassessments of the historical figures most associated with ’atheism’ and ’deism’ in early modern Britain, this collection opens the subject up for debate and shows how the new historiography of deism changes our understanding of heterodox religious identities in Britain from 1650 to 1800. It problematises the older view that individuals were atheist or deists in a straightforward sense and instead explores the plurality and flexibility of religious identities during this period. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, the volume enriches the debate about heterodoxy, offering new perspectives on a range of prominent figures and providing an overview of major changes in the field.
Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain
Title | Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain PDF eBook |
Author | Alexandra Walsham |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 530 |
Release | 2016-04-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317169239 |
The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.