The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. The Age of Enlightenment profoundly enriched religious and philosophical understanding and continues to influence present-day thinking. Works collected here include masterpieces by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as religious sermons and moral debates on the issues of the day, such as the slave trade. The Age of Reason saw conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism transformed into one between faith and logic -- a debate that continues in the twenty-first century. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T108968 With separate titlepages, pagination and register for each book. London: printed for John Graves, 1705. [24],262;[16],108p., plates; 4°

This facsimile edition features the intimately related writings of a mother, Lady Frances Norton (1640-1731), and her daughter, Lady Grace Gethin (1676-97). The posthumous publication of Gethin's collection of essays Misery's Virtues Whet-Stone (1699) was sponsored by her mother; subsequently Norton invoked her maternal grief as the grounds for publishing her own essay collection The Applause of Virtue to which is appended Memento Mori: Or, Meditations on Death (1705). These essay collections unconventionally privilege a female perspective on traditional topics such as friendship, love, marriage and death. Accordingly, they hold an intrinsic interest for their gendered point of view, as well as an extrinsic interest for their conditions of production. Norton's final published work, A Miscellany of Poems, Compos'd and work'd with a Needle, on the Backs and Seats &c. Of several Chairs and Stools (1714), further reprises the theme of maternal grief as the justification for women's writing. This extremely rare volume, which has not been listed in the English Short-Title Catalogue until now, is being reissued here for the first time since 1714.

Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732-1807, by Robert M. Andrews, is the first full-length study of Stevens’ life and thought. Historiographically revisionist and contextualised within a neglected history of lay High Church activism, Andrews presents Stevens as an influential High Church layman who brought to Anglicanism not only his piety and theological learning, but his wealth and business acumen. With extensive social links to numerous High Church figures in late Georgian Britain, Stevens’ lay activism is shown to be central to the achievements and effectiveness of the wider High Church movement during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.