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Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke

Online ISBN:
9780191683640
Print ISBN:
9780198269427
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke

B. W. Young
B. W. Young

Lecturer in Intellectual History

University of Sussex
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Published online:
3 October 2011
Published in print:
12 March 1998
Online ISBN:
9780191683640
Print ISBN:
9780198269427
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The author describes and analyses the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England, particularly in relation to those developments traditionally described as constituting the Enlightenment. It challenges conventional perceptions of an intellectually moribund institution by contextualising the polemical and scholarly debates in which churchmen engaged. In particular, it delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and the legacy of Locke. By emphasising the variety of its intellectual life, the book challenges those notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period. Thus, eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, notably those who contributed to a burgeoning interest in mysticism, are equally integral to this study.

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