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Abstract
This dissertation re-examines early Enlightenment culture and the religious politics of the post-Civil War British empire. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus of historians, it insists that the methodological, conceptual, and social repertoire of late humanism did not lead to any specific political or religious viewpoint. Instead, it argues that early Enlightenment culture is best understood as a set of cultural tools that elites used to support a wide variety of ideological agendas. I demonstrate this by offering a detailed study of authoritarian Anglican clergymen and their scholarly, political, and evangelical work in Britain and its fledgling Mediterranean empire. I then use the dissertation’s findings about the cultural history of the period to adumbrate a fundamentally new narrative of post-Civil War religious politics. The study shows that contemporaries struggled over competing solutions to a common problem: the need to re-organize the relationship between Christianity and politics in order to avert another descent into the violence, zealotry, and turmoil of the English Revolution.
The argument of the dissertation emerges in a narrative that evokes the world of a little-known Anglican minister and orientalist scholar named Lancelot Addison (1632-1703), father of the famous literary figure Joseph Addison. The dissertation follows the contours of Lancelot’s biography and exploits thousands of sources in manuscript and print to offer a series of case studies that illuminate the underpinnings of early Enlightenment culture, its scholarly and popular manifestations, and the arena of religious politics that it structured. By following Addison and his friends through Britain, across western Europe, on to Morocco, and back again, the study is able to link numerous topics that are usually studied in isolation, or ignored, and it is able to insist throughout on understanding British domestic politics in its continental and global contexts. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)