Anglican Enlightenment

At the centre of William Bulman’s impressively researched and original book is a re-examination of the Enlightenment in England. Bulman challenges the view that the Enlightenment was the ‘intellectual face’ of the Glorious Revolution. By this he means that the Enlightenment has previously been associated with the steady loosening of clerical strictures. Bulman suggests that this reading cannot be sustained. What he sees in the Anglicanism of the later Stuart era was a Church ‘teeming with creativity’; it was not one which could accommodate ‘ubiquitous piety and creeping modernity’. His objective is to write a holistic account of the theology and politics of the period. Bulman’s method to achieve this is to use the experiences of Lancelot Addison, senior, whose travels in Europe and Africa threw Anglicanism into sharp relief and whose writings enabled it to be viewed in a wider context. Through the lens of Addison’s writings on Jewish, Christian and Islamic piety, Bulman brings new insights into the theological basis of the later Stuart polity, Church and empire. In particular, he sheds light on the ways in which the post-Restoration Church sought to promote conformity

Ancient history · Empire · Enlightenment · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies