The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, 1600-1750

343 Pages·2012·2.056 MB·English

by  Sarah Mortimer, John Robertson (eds.)

The Intellectual Consequences of Religious
Heterodoxy 1600–1750
Brill’s Studies in
Intellectual History
General Editor
Han van Ruler, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Founded by
Arjo Vanderjagt
Editorial Board
C.S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
M. Colish, Yale University
J.I. Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
M. Mugnai, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
W. Otten, University of Chicago
VOLUME 211
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/bsih
The Intellectual Consequences
of Religious Heterodoxy
1600–1750
Edited by
Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson
LEIdEN • BOSTON
2012
Cover illustration: Title page of the second edition of Hermann Witsius’ Aegyptiaca (Amsterdam
1696). The work was a counterblast to those who argued that Egyptian religion was at least as
old as that of the Biblical Hebrews. The issue of priority was a critical fault-line in the study of
sacred history in the period, one of several points at which heterodoxy engaged with scholarship.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Seeley Librarian, University of Cambridge.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
The intellectual consequences of religious heterodoxy 1600–1750 / edited by Sarah Mortimer and
John Robertson.
  p. cm. — (Brill’s studies in intellectual history, ISSN 0920-8607 ; v. 211)
 Proceedings of a conference held Mar. 14–15, 2008 at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.
 Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-22146-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Heresy—History—17th century—Congresses.
2. Heresy—History—18th century—Congresses. 3. Intellectual life—17th century—Congresses.
4. Intellectual life—18th century—Congresses. 5. Church history—17th century—Congresses.
6. Church history—18th century—Congresses. I. Mortimer, Sarah. II. Robertson, John, 1951–
 BT1317.I58 2012
 273’.7—dc23
2011051727
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ISSN 0920-8607
ISBN 978-90-04-22146-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-22608-1 (e-book)
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CONTENTS
Preface  ................................................................................................................ vii
Notes on Contributors  ................................................................................... ix
Nature, Revelation, History: The Intellectual Consequences of
 Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750  ........................................................... 1
 Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson
Styles of Heterodoxy and Intellectual Achievement: Grotius and
 Arminianism  ................................................................................................ 47
 Hans W. Blom
Human and divine Justice in the Works of Grotius and the
 Socinians  ....................................................................................................... 75
 Sarah Mortimer
‘The Kingdom of darkness’: Hobbes and Heterodoxy ......................... 95
 Justin Champion
Henry Stubbe, Robert Boyle and the Idolatry of Nature  .................... 121
 Martin Mulsow
Heterodoxy and Sinology: Isaac Vossius, Robert Hooke and the
 Early Royal Society’s Use of Sinology  .................................................. 135
 William Poole
‘Lovers of Truth’ in Pierre Bayle’s and John Locke’s Thought  .......... 155
 S.-J. Savonius-Wroth
Spinoza and the Religious Radical Enlightenment  .............................. 181
 Jonathan Israel
Between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Italian Culture in the
 Early 1700s: Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia doria  ................ 205
 Enrico Nuzzo
vi contents
Conyers Middleton: The Historical Consequences of
 Heterodoxy  .................................................................................................. 235
 Brian Young
david Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) and the End of
 Modern Eusebianism  ................................................................................ 267
 Richard Serjeantson
Bibliography  ..................................................................................................... 297
Index  ................................................................................................................... 325
PREFACE
Like many other collections, this volume of essays originated in a confer-
ence, held under almost the same title, ‘The intellectual consequences of
religious heterodoxy 1650–1750’, at St Hugh’s College, Oxford on 14 and
15 March 2008. With one exception, all the essays were originally papers
presented, in a much shorter form, to the conference; these have since
been revised and enlarged. The exception is the opening essay by the edi-
tors, which was written after the majority of the revised contributions had
been received. In several respects this essay combines the functions of
introduction and conclusion: it ranges further than the individual contri-
butions which follow it, both to provide them with a framework and to
point the way beyond them.
We are grateful first of all to our contributors, both for their willingness
to participate in the original conference and for the care and thoroughness
with which they have revised and extended their papers in response to our
own and the publisher’s readers’ suggestions. We are particularly grateful
to Martin Mulsow, who was unable to attend the conference because of
illness, but allowed his paper to be read, and subsequently revised it for
publication. The publisher’s readers made helpful, constructive sugges-
tions, which we have followed wherever possible; we regret that it was
not possible to include a paper on French Catholic heterodoxy.
Besides our contributors, other participants at the conference con-
tributed actively to shaping discussion and taking the debate forwards.
Two who gave papers but who could not contribute to the volume are
Rosa Antognazza and Scott Mandelbrote; we particularly appreciate the
latter’s efforts to contribute in difficult circumstances. We are likewise
most grateful to those who came from Italy: Silvana d’Alessio, Camilla
Hermanin, Girolamo Imbruglia and Giuseppe Ricuperati. From within the
United Kingdom and Ireland were Sharon Achinstein, Thomas Ahnert,
Katy Barrett (who also took on a share of the organisation during the con-
ference), Christopher Brooke, John Christie, delphine doucet, James Har-
ris, Peter Harrison, Kevin Hilliard, Caspar Hirschi, Marian Hobson, Tim
Hochstrasser, Howard Hotson, Wayne Hudson, Sarah Hutton, Nicholas
Keene, Rhodri Lewis, Ted McCormick, Noel Malcolm, Matthew Niblett,
and Laura Schwartz.
viii preface
The conference was made possible by the financial support of the John
Fell Fund and the Faculty of History of Oxford University, the British Acad-
emy and the Royal Historical Society: we remain very grateful to them all.
Its smooth running owed much to the competence of the conference staff
and kitchen of St Hugh’s College.
The confidence and support of our publishers have been vital to this
volume. We are most grateful to a succession of editors at Brill—Erica
Pierik, Joëlle Horn, Rosanna Woensdregt and Wilma de Weert—for both
encouragement and patience, and to the editors of Brill’s Studies in Intel-
lectual History for accepting the volume within the series.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Hans Blom is Visiting Professor at the University of Potsdam; he was for-
merly Professor of Political Philosophy and Co-director of the Erasmus
Center for Early Modern Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Recently he has been teaching at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. He is the
author of Spinoza en De la Court: politieke wetenschap in de zeventiende
eeuw (Leiden, 1981) and Causality and morality in politics. The rise of natu-
ralism in Dutch seventeenth-century political thought (Utrecht 1995), and
of many articles and edited volumes on seventeenth-century dutch and
European political thought.
Justin Champion is Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal
Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Pillars of Priest-
craft Shaken: the Church of England and Its Enemies 1660–1730 (Cambridge,
1992), Republican Learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture,
c1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), and editor of John Toland’s Nazarenus
(The Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 1999) and the Works of Robert Moles-
worth (The Liberty Fund 2011).
Jonathan Israel is a Professor of Modern European History at the Institute
of Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is the author of Radical Enlighten-
ment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001);
Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of
Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006); and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy,
Revolution and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011), as well as of works
on Spanish, dutch and Jewish history.
Sarah Mortimer is an Official Student and Tutor of Christ Church, Oxford,
and a University Lecturer in History. She was formerly a Junior Research
Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is the author of
Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: the Challenge of Socinianism
(Cambridge, 2010).
Martin Mulsow is Professor für Wissenskulturen der europäischen Neuzeit
at the University of Erfurt, and direktor des Forschungszentrums für kul-
tur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien Gotha. Among other works he is
x notes on contributors
the author of Moderne aus dem Untergrund. Radikale Frühaufklärung in
Deutschland 1680–1720 (Hamburg, 2002), and Die unanständige Gelehrten-
republik. Wissen, Libertinage und Kommunikation in der Frühen Neuzeit
(Stuttgart, 2007), English translation forthcoming as Decorum and Dis-
corder: The Republic of Letters 1550–1750 (Ann Arbor).
Enrico Nuzzo is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the Università
degli Studi di Salerno. He is the author of numerous studies of Vico,
including the two collections Tra ordine della storia e storicità. Saggi sui
saperi della storia in Vico (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001),
and Tra religione e prudenza. Saggi sulla filosofia pratica di Giambattista
Vico (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007), and of works on Con-
dillac, doria, and the English Republicans of the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries.
William Poole is John Galsworthy Fellow of New College, Oxford, where
he is Tutor in English. He is the author of Milton and the Idea of the Fall
(Cambridge, 2005), The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the
Search for the Origins of the Earth (Oxford, 2010), and John Aubrey and the
Advancement of Learning (Oxford, 2010).
John Robertson is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the Uni-
versity of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Clare College. He was for-
merly Fellow and Tutor in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and a
University Lecturer in Modern History. He is the author of The Case for the
Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005).
Sami-Juhani Savonius-Wroth is an Academy of Finland Fellow in History
at the University of Helsinki. He has co-edited, with Paul Schuurman
and Jonathan Walmsley, The Continuum Companion to Locke (London and
New York, 2010), and is now completing a monograph on John Locke and
the early Enlightenment.
Richard Serjeantson is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
teaches history. Among his publications are ‘Herbert of Cherbury before
deism: The early reception of the De veritate’, The Seventeenth Century,
16 (2001), 217–38, and ‘Hume’s General Rules and the “Chief Business of
Philosophers” ’, in Impressions of Hume, ed. by Marina Frasca-Spada and
P. J. E. Kail (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 187–212.