Laborie and Hessayon bring rare prophetic and millenarian texts to an international audience by presenting sources from all over Europe (broadly defined), and across the early modern period in English for the first time.

Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.

Susan Schreiner’s students and colleagues explore the themes of Scriptural exegesis, authority, and the certainty or doubt of salvation in the early modern era and beyond.

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, numerous apocalyptical and messianic movements came to the fore across Eurasia and North Africa, raising questions about possible interconnections. Why were eschatological movements so pervasive in early modern times? This volume provides some answers to this question by exploring the interconnected histories of confessions and religions from Moscow to Cusco. It offers a broad picture of Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish and Islamic eschatological movements from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thereby bridging important and long-standing gaps in the historiography. Apocalypse Now will appeal to both researchers and students of the history of early modern religion and politics in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic worlds. By exploring connections between numerous eschatological movements, it gives a fresh insight into one of the most promising fields of European and global history.

'At a historic moment, when religion shows all its social and political strength in various post-modern societies around our globe, this fascinating collection of studies from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century Europe demonstrates all the richness and innovative force of investigating individual and shared experiences when questioning the cultural, political and social place of religion in society. It also makes known in English the work of a series of Finnish historians elaborating together a pioneering vision of the notion of experience in the discipline of history.' - Piroska Nagy, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada This open access book offers a theoretical introduction to the history of experience on three conceptual levels: everyday experience, experience as process, and experience as structure. Chapters apply 'experience' to empirical case studies, exploring how people have made and shared their religion through experience in history. This book understands experience as a simultaneously socially constructed and intimately personal process that connects individuals to communities and past to future, thereby forming structures that create and direct societies. It represents the crossroads of a new field of the history of experience, and an established tradition of the history of lived religion. Chapters offer a longue duree view from the fourteenth-century heretics, via experiences of miracle, madness, sickness, suffering, prayer, conversion and death, to the religious artisanship of soldiers in the Second World War frontlines. It concentrates on Northern Europe, but includes materials from Italy, France and United Kingdom.

The authors revisit the idea that Enlightenment spearheaded secularization. This book invites all to look at the Enlightenment religiosity as founded on a merger of religious criticism and heterodoxy.