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appointments to Dissenters. We have here, therefore, in terms of the origin of the English deist critique of the Church in the politico-religious crisis of the 1680s and 1690s,2 a confluence of religious, political and economic issues that was of great moment indeed. It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the last decades of the seventeenth century in the development of vital and enduring facets of British history. It may seem strange to newcomers to this field that while it is freely acknowledged that the intense politicization of religion in the Restoration
eighteenth-century international ‘deist movement’, which has been considered ‘especially strong in Britain and France’.3 It has consequently been noted that amongst some historians there has been an ‘obsessive iteration of “modernity” as a watchword of Enlightenment’.4 In his Christianity under the Ancien Régime 1648–1789 (1999), Ward has suggested that the number of deist writers was ‘immense’.5 Herrick (The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists, 1997) has claimed that English deists were so numerous that they posed a threat to the social and religious order.6 In his
theory was elaborated in greater detail in Republican News on 24 November. The centre piece of their evidence was the British Army’s Brigadier Frank Kitson, a counter-insurgency expert who had recently served in Belfast and written a ‘little book’ detailing his part in the Mau-Mau campaign, revealing how accusations against the insurgents of ritual brutality and ‘barbaric magic’ had been fostered as black propaganda
absolutist secular rule with the perceived religious despotism of the Curia and the Papal States. In the case in Britain, which had already developed political parties in the late seventeenth century, it is appropriate to talk also of party-political struggle, in which the condition of the Church was still a very important issue indeed and supposed threats to the 5 The Enlightenment and religion Church were politically exploited in a very public manner. In its various forms, then, an understanding of the broad politicization of religion is central to any understanding of
–57. 23 Ibid ., 22–23. 24 Köln, 1480 and Lyons, 1669. See below. 25 Speyer, 1487 (Schnyder fac., Houghton Library Inc. 2367.5, British Library IB 8581); Lyons, 1669 (Bruce Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta, BF 1569 I59 I669; BL 719.1.18); Cologne 1494
-Saxon communities to ritually appropriate their environment, to propagate and generate myths about their origin and identity. The placement of seventh-century burials bordering the Roman villa at Eccles in Kent (Williams 1997 ), or sixth-century burials alongside the Romano-British temple on Gallows Hill, Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire (Malim, 2006 ), and beside the Romano-British bath house at Orpington, Kent (Palmer, 1984 ), tell us a great deal about what was visible in the Early Middle Ages and the importance that these ancient structures may have had ( Figure 2
before the witch trials of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and continued to exist in Europe and Britain for some considerable time after the witchcraft laws had been repealed. 30 Yet scholars have dismissed ‘belief’ as a universal, a constant that explains nothing 31 and gone looking for social, economic, even biological and meteorological causes for ‘witch crazes’, to the point that a widespread, consistent and authoritative
–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 17 Published in French as part of his Lettres philosophiques in 1734. 18 On Jansenism and the public sphere see, for instance, J. Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 2. 19 Munck, The Enlightenment, pp. vii, 30. For discussion on various aspects of English dissent and Enlightenment see, for example, K. Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion. Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain 219 The Enlightenment and religion 20 21 22 23 24 25
Between roughly 1450 and 1750, secular, Inquisitorial, and ecclesiastical courts across continental Europe,the British Isles,and the American colonies tried approximately 110,000 people for the crime of witchcraft, executing around 60,000. 1 All historiography dealing with early modern witchcraft is concerned,on some level,with explaining why this happened. There is no shortage of interpretations: the last thirty years
English paradigm, contradicting continuity with local traditions more clearly. The English example also indicates the possibility of several mutually exclusive meanings of the term ‘witchcraft’. For instance, there were, and still are, thousands of magical practitioners of a great variety spread all over Europe, Britain included. They are sometimes addressed with terms that translate as ‘witch’, but it would be highly confusing