Anglican Enlightenment
Subtitle: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648-1715
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 357
ISBN-13: 9781107073685
Subjects: Church of england, history; Religion and politics; Enlightenment; Great britain, church history, 17th century
Description: "An original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post- Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the Church's historical scholarship, social science, pastoral care, and political practice amounted not to a culturally-backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalisation. In seeking to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided over what it meant in practice"--