A reappraisal of the legacy of Benjamin Hoadly, the 18th Century bishop whose liberal and rationalist views had a considerable influence on the English Enlightenment and the American Revolution.

Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment offers a comprehensive assessment of Benedict's engagement with Enlightenment art, science, spirituality, and culture.

Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732-1807, by Robert M. Andrews, is the first full-length study of Stevens’ life and thought. Historiographically revisionist and contextualised within a neglected history of lay High Church activism, Andrews presents Stevens as an influential High Church layman who brought to Anglicanism not only his piety and theological learning, but his wealth and business acumen. With extensive social links to numerous High Church figures in late Georgian Britain, Stevens’ lay activism is shown to be central to the achievements and effectiveness of the wider High Church movement during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This book considers how Early Modern England was transformed from a turbulent and rebellious kingdom into a peaceable land. By considering the history of Taunton, Somerset, the most rebellious town in the kingdom, it is possible to see how the emerging features of the Enlightenment - moderation, reason and rational theology - effected that transformation. The experience of Taunton in the seventeenth century was marked by economic fluctuations of the cloth trade and military struggles in the Civil War, the Monmouth Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution. The primary motivation for the citizens was zealous Puritanism. It inspired support for Parliament and rebellion against James II. But in the final quarter of the century a new rational and moderate Protestantism emerged from the largest Nonconformist congregation in the country and from a distinguished dissenting academy. The study shows that both the militancy of the seventeenth century and the enlightened moderation of the eighteenth century were principally inspired by religious rather than secular values. This book contributes to our understanding of England's transformation and of the religious factors that stimulated it.

Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

Dan Taylor was a leading English eighteenth-century General Baptist minister and founder of the New Connexion of General Baptists—a revival movement. This book provides considerable new light on the theological thinking of this important evangelical figure. The major themes examined are Taylor’s spiritual formation; soteriology; understanding of the atonement; beliefs regarding the means and process of conversion; ecclesiology; approach to baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and worship; and missiology. The nature of Taylor’s evangelicalism—its central characteristics, underlying tendencies, evidence of the shaping influence of certain Enlightenment values, and ways that it was outworked—reflect that which was distinct about evangelicalism as a movement emerging from the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival. It is thus especially relevant to recent debates regarding the origins of evangelicalism. Taylor’s evangelicalism was particularly marked by its pioneering nature. His propensity for innovation serves as a unifying theme throughout the book, with many of its accompanying patterns of thinking and practical expressions demonstrating that which was distinct about evangelicalism in the eighteenth century.