Publisher's Synopsis
This collection of essays brings together international scholars examining the role of religion during a period whose scholarship has typically concentrated on the secular. While Locke, Newton, and Hume are central to understanding the Restoration and Augustan era, religious debates made their presence known everywhere. Issues of toleration, Deism, dissent, original sin, enthusiasm, and women's roles in religion appeared in sermons, novels, plays, pamphlets, and poetry. Studying religion necessarily leads us into the world of the economy, class, gender, rhetoric, philosophy, material culture, and aesthetics. Through disparate approaches to American and British literature and culture, these essays demonstrate how religion remained a central part of lived experience and literature during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.
