Enlightening enthusiasm: Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

Enlightening enthusiasm

Enlightening enthusiasm

Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenth-century England

Lionel Laborie

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Lionel Laborie 2015

The right of Lionel Laborie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8988 6 hardback

First published 2015

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Contents

List of illustrations

List of tables

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Note on style and dates

Introduction

1 The origins of the French Prophets

2 From the Désert to the New Jerusalem

3 The final reformation

4 Going public

5 Enthusiasm, blasphemy and toleration

6 Medicalising enthusiasm

Conclusion

Appendix: Chronological profile of the French Prophets

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1 Casper Luyken, Le Theatre de la guerre dans les Sevennes (Rotterdam, 1703), © Amsterdam Museum

2 The English and French Prophets Mad or Bewitcht (London, 1707), © Houghton Library, Harvard University

3 Letter from Marie Huber to Nicolas Fatio (3 February 1719), © Bibliothèque de Genève

4 S. Conneand, New Prophets: Their Historical and True Picture (London, 1708), © Houghton Library, Harvard University

5 Charles Corbett, Enthusiasm Display’d; or, The Moor-Fields Congregation (1739), © Wellcome Trust Library

6 Pillory Disapointed; or, The False Prophets Advancement (London, 1707), © Bodleian Library, Oxford

Tables

1 Occupations of male believers

2 Known occupations of male believers by denomination (per cent)

3 Sentences at common law for offences in relation to religious opinion

Acknowledgements

This book developed from my PhD thesis and took several more years to complete. I first came across the French Prophets about ten years ago during a research visit to the British Library and I immediately decided this would be the subject of my PhD Ten years later, I am still amazed to find new traces of them in remote European archives. I have had the opportunity to meet many people since I began this adventure, some of whom have become friends over time, and all have contributed to this book in one form or another.

First of all I would like to acknowledge the assistance of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council that enabled me to do this PhD and carry out the necessary fieldwork for it. I am equally grateful to the Société Genévoise pour l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français for its generous support upon completing my doctorate.

My greatest debt goes to Hillel Schwartz: for his encouragement and hospitality, for giving me full access to his personal archives, and for reading earlier drafts of this book. I am also greatly indebted to Mrs Shirley Stack, who welcomed me into her beautiful house and allowed me to consult her family archives. In addition, I wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the Bibliothèque de Genève, the Bibliothèque de la Société du Protestantisme Français, Chetham’s Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Dr Williams’s Library, Lambeth Palace Library, the Wellcome Library, Cambridge University Library, the Historical Library of the Francke Foundation, the Cheshire and Hertfordshire Archives, the House of Lords Records Office, the Friends House Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, Bethlem Royal Hospital, and The National Archives.

I have also greatly benefited from the kindness, support, advice and expertise of many friends and colleagues on numerous occasions, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank (in alphabetical order) Rebekah Ahrendt, Irena Backus, Philip Benedict, Christopher Bonfield, Martha Campbell, Jean-Paul Chabrol, Emmanuelle Chaze, Beverly Collins, Jean-Noël Commères, Birgit Emich, Olivier Fatio, Abe Garfield, Malcolm Gaskill, William Gibson, Crawford Gribben, Jürgen Gröschl, Petra Hahm, Ariel Hessayon, Michael Lackner, Véronique Lacoste, Charles-Edouard Levillain, Amy Levinson Sosnick, Carolyn Lougee Chappell, Matthew Mesley, Martin Mulsow, Andreas Pecˇar, Cristina Pitassi, Evelyn Rymus, Nat Schmelzer, Christopher Slattery, Blodwen Tarter, Jean-Paul and Sara Trelaun, David van der Linden, and Ruben Verwaal.

My final thanks go to my family: my parents Guy and Véronique; my siblings Aurore, Clément and Joël; and of course my long-time partner Daniel.

Abbreviations

Note on style and dates

All quotations from manuscripts and printed primary sources are rendered in their original spelling.

The Le Sage papers in Geneva consist essentially of notes written on the backs of playing cards and are therefore referred to by the figure and suit they correspond to.

All dates follow the ‘old style’ calendar as found in the original British sources, except for Continental sources, which should be understood as ‘new style’. In either case, 1 January is taken to mark the beginning of the year, according to the modern practice.

Introduction

The Enlightenments

The long eighteenth century is generally associated with the Enlightenment, an intellectual golden age that established rationalism as the basis of modern thinking. Proponents of this philosophical revolution engaged in the development of sciences and attempted to rationalise faith, tradition and superstitions.¹ For Louis Dupré, ‘thinking became simpler, more rational, and more methodic. Religion and morality continued to be primary concerns, but they became subjected to a critical examination.’² Europe saw at last the light of Reason and reached its intellectual maturity after centuries of religious obscurantism, ignorance and tyranny. Resolutely optimistic and humanistic, the European Enlightenment was thus driven by ideals of individual freedom, and scientific and social progress. In its emancipation from religion lies what we define as the origins of modernity.

The story of the Age of Reason has long lived. It should not come as a surprise if it was first sketched out by none other than the philosophers of the long eighteenth century themselves. Dan Edelstein even traces its origins to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in late seventeenth-century France.³ Endlessly repeated, the Enlightenment narrative has been revised and nuanced in recent decades. Strong national variations are now recognised within this European movement to begin with. Much focus has been placed on les Lumières because of their distinctive anticlericalism, on L’Encyclopédie and the climax of the French Revolution; or on die Aufklärung for its classical aestheticism, its nationalistic inclinations and its self-awareness as a philosophical movement.⁴ There was also a Dutch Enlightenment, rooted in science, free press and the emergence of a public sphere;⁵ a Scottish Enlightenment, liberal and particularly concerned with the common good; and, of course, an English one. The latter, generally believed to begin around the Glorious Revolution, emphasised natural rights and Government reforms. Once European, several historians have reclaimed the Enlightenment as originally English, even though its distinctiveness from the British Enlightenment has long remained an enigma.⁶ Beyond the sterility of such questions, a consensus has emerged over the multifaceted nature of this intellectual golden age, whose delineated national boundaries have opened the door for further revisions.

More importantly for our purposes, the European Enlightenment has been deconstructed in recent years into countless variants both within and across these national boundaries: it may henceforth be described as radical, pragmatic, urban, democratic or popular, but also racist, postcolonial, industrial, medical, religious, theological, Catholic, Jewish, Rosicrucian, feministic or libertine, among other things.⁷ Although contested, interrupted and with numerous enemies, it now has its own genealogy and lately became rural and even edible.⁸ The eighteenth century undoubtedly marked a period of great changes and transformations, for better or worse. Yet in light of such recent foci, the Enlightenment no longer appears as a linear, coherent transnational intellectual movement, some even denying its existence altogether.

No matter which Enlightenment we choose to look at, religion remained central to eighteenth-century life and its intellectual developments. As Justin Champion pointed out, the very fact that antireligious opinions were increasingly expressed in public implies the persisting centrality of the Church. The political, cultural and intellectual transformations of this period ought as a result to be placed back into their immediate religious context.⁹ This was true of the English Enlightenment, but also of its Continental counterparts.

Yet the former, perhaps more so than any of the latter, was not driven by anticlerical ideals. On the contrary, it arose within a heterogeneous religious matrix delineated by the Toleration Act of 1689. Free from the threat of persecution, nonconformists, deists and freethinkers not only challenged the grounds of the Established Church, and consequently political rule, but also played a significant role in the development of the sciences and rationalism.¹⁰ It may be argued for this reason that religion influenced early Enlightenment science to a greater extent than the other way around. Both should in fact be regarded as complementary rather than opposites. The English Enlightenment remained, in other words, intrinsically religious.¹¹

Enthusiasm

This book does not intend to add yet another variant to the growing plethora of Enlightenments mentioned above. Nor does it deny their existence. Instead, it concentrates on what is generally regarded as the shadow of the ‘Age of Reason’, its negative mirror or its ‘Antiself’, namely enthusiasm.¹² Enthusiasm, as we understand it here, was a far cry from its modern meaning. From the Greek entheos meaning ‘inhabited by God’s Spirit’, the term ‘enthusiasm’ appeared in the English language in the late sixteenth century to denigrate the spawn of the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into the vernacular helped to disseminate the Scriptures to a wider audience and gave more visibility to more obscure parts, such as the books of Daniel and Revelation. Luther’s defence of an individual interpretation of the Scriptures had indirectly produced an effervescence of radical sects such as the Anabaptists and the Familists, who developed new doctrines based on divine revelation.¹³ These enthusiasts – Schwärmer in German – claimed to be possessed by the Holy Spirit and defended an exclusive relationship with God. The Spirit allegedly infused them with the power to foretell the future (prophecy), perform miraculous cures (thaumaturgy) and speak in tongues (glossolalia), and often led them to challenge any form of authority.¹⁴ Enthusiasm was thus fundamentally transgressive. In short, it epitomised the Reformation gone out of (ecclesiastical) control.

Its true essence, however, did not only reside in the conviction of infallible divine inspirations, but also and perhaps mainly in the visible presence of the Holy Spirit in their bodies. For these moments of inspiration were typically accompanied by convulsions and a large range of physical manifestations, which Ronald Knox referred to in terms of ‘ultrasupernaturalism’. Enthusiasts presented themselves as ‘Instruments’ of the Spirit; their bodies served, in their view, as empty vessels channelling the divine – an ataxic religious experience that made enthusiasm both natural and supernatural, corporeal and ethereal, material and spiritual.¹⁵

Enthusiasm often emerged in turbulent political and religious times. Having unmasked the Pope as the Antichrist, many Protestants henceforth believed that the world was in its latter days. The wars of religion seemed to corroborate this view and confirmed enthusiasts in their millenarianism – that is the belief in Christ’s imminent Second Coming ahead of his thousand-year reign, the Millennium.¹⁶ Similarly, the Civil Wars and Interregnum in the mid-seventeenth century offered fertile ground for enthusiasm in England. Numerous self-proclaimed visionaries and pseudo-messiahs announcing the end of the world emerged during this traumatic interval, often within larger movements like the Quakers, the Ranters, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchists and the Muggletonians.¹⁷ These enthusiasts typically counterposed their indefectible faith to human reason and challenged both secular and clerical authority. Conversely, Anglican ministers embraced rational theology as a weapon against enthusiasm from the mid-seventeenth century, in response to what they perceived as a threat to political and religious stability and social peace.¹⁸ Although a common derogatory synonym for religious fanaticism in the mouth of most Anglicans, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was also employed more broadly against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers, or anyone claiming superior knowledge.¹⁹ If the term itself dates back to the early Reformation, enthusiasm did not become a major concern of public debate until the English Revolution, and ultimately became the eighteenth-century smear word par excellence.²⁰

Historians have argued that the English Enlightenment emerged in response to the proliferation of enthusiasm in the mid-seventeenth century.²¹ Yet the historiographical emphasis on the advent of rationalism eclipsed for too long the religious reality and developments that ensued from this pivotal period. Even such a classic as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic only dedicated a few pages to the question of enthusiasm, suggesting instead that supernatural beliefs and practices dwindled by 1700.²² More recent studies have substantially revised this view to reveal a much more complex relationship between faith and reason in the long eighteenth century. Clarke Garrett broke a historiographical taboo by rehabilitating millenarian beliefs in prophecy and miracles as part of a ‘mystical Enlightenment’.²³ More recently, Jane Shaw, Susan Juster and Paul Kléber Monod, among others, have demonstrated the persistence of miraculous, prophetic and occult literature throughout the eighteenth century and even argued for a revived interest in the supernatural around the revolutionary period.²⁴

For all their individual merits these studies only address the question of enthusiasm in passing. Few scholars have given it proper consideration since Ronald Knox. His Enthusiasm remains a worthy read despite the author’s Catholic bias and misleading attempt to capture medieval heresies and radical Protestant movements into a single Christian narrative. More focused studies have followed since then. David Lovejoy looked at the transatlantic implantation of enthusiasm and the evangelical revival in mid-eighteenth-century America. Michael Heyd has provided us with an important analysis of the opposition to religious enthusiasm in the wake of the Enlightenment. Klein and La Vopa took a wider perspective on the subject to illustrate the semantic variations attached to the notion of enthusiasm across Europe, while Jordana Rosenberg recently traced the English narrative of secularisation and modernity in eighteenth-century anti-enthusiastic discourse. Drawing from several disciplines, Ann Taves made the most significant contribution to our understanding of enthusiasm by breaking for the first time its conventional polarisation between plebeian experiences of religion and patrician critique. The reality and dynamics of enthusiasm were indeed far more complex than has long been assumed, as the following case aims to show.²⁵

The French Prophets

In the summer of 1706, three prophets arrived in London from the southern French province of Languedoc and were to give birth to one of the most controversial cases of enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England. Durand Fage (1681–c. 1750), Jean Cavalier (1686–c. 1740) and the charismatic Elie Marion (1678–1713) were Camisards, Calvinist rebels from the last French war of religion (1702–10) who had fought against Louis XIV’s persecution of his Protestant subjects. These three men immediately delivered apocalyptic predictions in ecstatic trances to the local Huguenot community, but rapidly saw an influx of English followers, chief among whom were John Lacy (1664–1730), a well-to-do Justice of the Peace; and the Irish baronet and Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Richard Bulkeley (1660–1710); as well as Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753), a Swiss mathematician of international fame, also a Fellow of the Royal Society and a close friend of Isaac Newton. With almost 500 followers in two years, their movement quickly became known as the ‘French Prophets’ in reference to its founders rather than its actual composition.

The support they received from their wealthy disciples enabled the Prophets to broadcast their message to Londoners more easily and thus contributed to the group’s expansion. If England was no stranger to millenarian predictions from both Anglicans and dissenters alike, as Warren Johnston’s brilliant study recently demonstrated, the French Prophets sparked a new, heated debate on the nature of enthusiasm and the limits of toleration.²⁶ Their international and socially transgressive identity, combined with a physical approach to religion that ranged from visions, convulsions, foaming at the mouth and swelling bellies to howling and grunting, left nobody indifferent. Like their millenarian predecessors of the Civil War period, the Prophets sought to revive the communal spirit of primitive Christianity and to reconcile Protestant denominations by emphasising religious experience over theological boundaries. In short, their enthusiasm was not the expression of, but the remedy to, sectarianism. Yet their physical extravagance caused much turmoil in London, which resulted in Marion’s condemnation to the scaffold for blasphemy with two of his scribes in November 1707. Still, the group’s defiance showed no limits; Lacy was subsequently predicted to raise his coreligionist Dr Thomas Emes from the dead on 25 May 1708, but the miracle failed to occur. The group then proceeded to expel impostors from its ranks and divided into twelve missionary tribes according to the twelve tribes of Israel.

Prophetic expeditions followed across the British Isles, on the Continent and even to colonial America over the following years, with the most successful missions in Quietist Scotland and Pietist Germany. Although dispersed and largely discredited, the French Prophets maintained some activity in England until the 1740s, but their numbers had already decreased sharply. Their movement was eventually absorbed under Quaker and Methodist influences into the foundation of Shakerism by James and Jane Wardley around Manchester in 1747. One of their disciples, Ann Lee, emigrated to America with her followers in 1774 and founded the first Shaker colony in upstate New York. Only a handful of Shakers remain today, at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.²⁷

The French Prophets deserve our attention in many ways as the epitome of eighteenth-century enthusiasm. One may be tempted to view them on a radical spectrum, filling a chronological gap between Civil War and Restoration dissenters on the one hand, and mid-eighteenth-century revivalists on the other. If, as Monod argued, western esotericists – broadly defined as astrologers, alchemists and magicians – freely drew from one another, the prospect of a traceable English radical tradition spanning across the early modern period seems absurd. It would only perpetuate the polemic constructions found in famous heresiographies like Thomas Edwards’s Gangræna (London, 1646) and anti-enthusiastic Augustan narratives. As Hessayon and Finnegan remind us, radicalism is a modern concept applied retrospectively and often teleogically to early modern events. In this context, enthusiasts were radical in the etymological sense of the term; they bypassed and dismissed their contemporaries or predecessors to return directly to the roots of Christianity.²⁸ As such, enthusiasm may be considered as a sporadic pattern stemming from the Radical Reformation, rather than underlaying schismatic tradition.

Often cited – not without some condescension – as an entertaining anecdote in late Stuart and early Hanoverian history, the French Prophets had in reality a substantial impact on the society of their time. They explicitly denounced the supremacy of rationalism in what is regarded as the early English Enlightenment, a particularly rich and dynamic period supported by a free press and fast-growing public sphere. Little wonder that, as we shall see, they attracted the attention of the most eminent minds of their time, including Daniel Defoe; Jonathan Swift; Joseph Addison; Richard Steele; Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury; or even Isaac Newton. More importantly, the fact that the Prophets caused riots, a prodigious battle of pamphlets, that they challenged the limits of religious tolerance and fed into a medical debate on madness, suggests that this new episode of enthusiasm touched upon some of the most sensitive questions that animated and divided eighteenth-century English society.

Approach

For all the ink spilled over their enthusiasm at the time, the French Prophets received little historiographical attention thereafter. Ironically, the first accounts came from France around the turn of the twentieth century as a sequel to the better known Camisard rebellion in the Cévennes.²⁹ Although Knox dedicated a chapter to the Prophets in his survey of enthusiasm, it was not until the 1970s that the first dedicated studies of their movement appeared in English.³⁰ Similar case studies on the English Revolution and Restoration sects appeared in the same period, many of which have since become classics in their field. It was Hillel Schwartz who in 1980 offered the best and most in-depth account of the French Prophets, based on an unprecedented range of archival research.³¹ Clarke Garrett subsequently traced their enthusiasm across the Atlantic through the Shakers in North America.³² After another period of silence, the Camisard Prophets inspired a third generation of scholars and even saw some of their original works reprinted in the past twenty years.³³ Despite this renewed interest, Schwartz’s work undoubtedly remains the best researched and most authoritative scholarship on the French Prophets to date.

This book does not intend to rewrite Schwartz’s sociocultural history of the French Prophets, but rather to offer a new perspective on their controversy by focusing on enthusiasm and subsidiary issues at stake. It proposes therefore to leave aside the Prophets’ millenarian missions across the British Isles and on the Continent for a separate study, and to concentrate instead on eighteenth-century English society. More precisely, its chronological framework spans from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the reign of James II in 1685 to the French Prophets’ extinction by the mid-eighteenth century. Although the Prophets will remain the focus of our study, this wider chronological scope will enable us to consider other prominent enthusiasts of the period such as John Taylor, John Mason, Thomas Beverley, Thomas Moor(e) or William Freke, as well as larger movements like the Quakers, the Philadelphian Society and the early Methodists. Together these enthusiasts will provide a powerful insight into the religious landscape of eighteenth-century England.

Surveying such a range of enthusiastic cases requires some terminological clarification in order to distinguish among sub-currents both within and outside the French Prophets’ movement. By ‘Camisards’ is understood here those prophets who took part in the rebellion in the Cévennes mountains, while ‘French Prophets’ denotes more broadly the followers of their movement in England, regardless of their actual nationality. Since most of them were in fact English, they will be referred to as ‘English Prophets’ whenever national differences are discussed within their community. Similarly, the term ‘Instrument’ will be used to designate those charismatic members who claimed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and to possess the gifts of prophecy, tongues or miracles among the group. Lastly, it is important to bear in mind that the French Prophets remained at first non-sectarians and that enthusiasm as a religious experience could be found both within and outside the Church of England. Enthusiasm cannot therefore be automatically equated with radical dissent, hence its complex and controversial nature.

The sheer number of millenarian works published in that period suggests an unshaken fascination for, if not an obsession with, enthusiasm throughout the eighteenth century. This book therefore aims to explore the nature and significance of enthusiasm through related issues at stake such as social norms, millenarianism, ecumenism, freedom and censorship, toleration and madness. It argues that the English understanding of enthusiasm shifted from a wholly religious issue to an epistemological one around 1700, with the recognition of nonconformity, the expansion of a public sphere and the emergence of a medical market.³⁴ It contends on that basis that this debate was in fact largely driven by the fear of a social epidemic and even that of a contagious physical disease ravaging early eighteenth-century England. In light of these considerations, this book calls as a result for a more comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, which its thematic structure seeks to reflect in six chapters.

Chapter 1 traces the footsteps of the French Prophets from their origins in the Cévennes mountains to their arrival in London. It identifies the Camisards as a poorer Huguenot subculture animated by beliefs in prophecy and martyrdom. An examination of their rebellion and enthusiasm in France will prove essential to understanding the controversy around the French Prophets in England throughout the rest of the book.

Drawing from extensive prosopographical research, the second chapter will then explore the formation, composition and organisation of the French Prophets’ movement. It argues on the basis of their great confessional, social and national heterogeneity that they formed a socially transgressive ecumenical society rather than a dissenting sect. A comparison with contemporary communities will suggest more generally that enthusiasm ought to be dissociated not only from sectarianism and radical dissent, but also from what historians often reduce to ‘popular religion’.

Chapter 3 explores the Prophets’ beliefs and practices in an attempt to understand how their enthusiasm fitted into the English religious landscape. By transcending the denominational boundaries of their time, the Prophets sought to revive the communitarian spirit of primitive Christianity ahead of Christ’s Second Coming. Often compared to the early Quakers, they dismissed seventeenth-century enthusiasts and drew instead directly from the Montanist movement in the post-apostolic age. If their ecumenical outreach appealed to both Anglicans and nonconformists alike, this chapter will show that the group remained plagued by diverging millenarian aspirations that eventually precipitated it into disbandment.

Having established the presence of pre-existing networks of wealthy supporters and printers among their ranks, Chapter 4 will consider the Prophets’ enthusiastic irruption into the English public sphere that developed from the Toleration Act in 1689 and the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. This process took place in two forms: orally through the holding of ecumenical millenarian assemblies and in print through the publication of their prophetical warnings. Their acute sense of publicity, the crowds they attracted and the battle of pamphlets they inspired reveal a persisting fascination for enthusiasm across all levels of eighteenth-century English society.

Chapter 5 draws on these street and print controversies to examine the political response to enthusiasm in post-Toleration England. It argues that the French Prophets challenged the limits of toleration with their heterodox practices and that public pressure prompted both religious and secular authorities to rid society of these foreign enthusiasts. Looking at Elie Marion’s trial in light of other criminal cases of the period, this chapter surveys the evolution of the law on blasphemy and seditious libel and studies Government response to enthusiasm.

Lastly, the book will consider the scientific debate on the nature and physicality of enthusiasm. Although clerics and natural philosophers increasingly resorted to a medical terminology to explain enthusiasm during the Interregnum and the Restoration, it was not until the early eighteenth century that physicians began to show an interest in its physical symptoms. Chapter 6 will thus consider to what extent this perceived social epidemic might be medicalised into an actual bodily disease. It will be argued that the French Prophets in particular and enthusiasm in general contributed to the emergence of a medicine of the mind in the early Enlightenment.

Overall, the book aims to debunk a number of myths on enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England based on new archival research. In addition to key archival records already examined by Schwartz such as the Fatio papers in Geneva or the Stack collection in Somerset, this book also builds largely upon new primary source materials discovered in recent years and even months. These include in particular the original court record of Elie Marion’s trial, six manuscript volumes on the French Prophets’ assemblies, foreign accounts of their activities in England and several pamphlets by or against the Prophets, as well as a previously unknown engraving.³⁵ It also makes use of hitherto neglected French Prophets’ works and integrates new biographical and prosopographical data on their movement. These results are compiled into a list of followers in the appendix.³⁶

The case of the French Prophets, considered through their ecumenical appeal to both Anglicans and nonconformists alike, suggests that England retained a vibrant millenarian culture at all levels of society throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. This unique social and denominational diversity reflects the transgressive nature of enthusiasm. In light of this evidence, this book argues that enthusiasm ought to be dissociated from religious dissent and more generally from ‘superstitious’ or irrational popular religion. Refusing to acknowledge this reality, the Enlightenment understanding of enthusiasm was that of a multifarious concept, halfway between a religious fanaticism, a social plague and a bodily madness. Yet, as we shall see, the former owes in reality much to the latter.

Notes

1 Allen W. Wood, ‘The Enlightenment’, in Lindsay Jones (ed. in chief), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn, 14 vols (New York: Macmillan, 2005), Vol. IV, pp. 2795–99.

2 Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. xiii.

3 Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 37–43.

4 Dupré, The Enlightenment, pp. 8–9.

5 Titles in notes 5–8 not included in the bibliography are cited for illustrative purposes only and have not been consulted directly. Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijhnhardt (eds), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

6 Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in Perez Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics, From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 91–111 (p. 91).

7 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Dennis Carl Rasmussen, The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Richard Squibbs, Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay: Transatlantic Retrospects (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). David Worrall, Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (eds), Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Peter M. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds), The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Jeffrey Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Ulrich Lehner and Michael O’Neill Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010). Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Frances Amelia Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1972]). Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). P. M. Cryle and Lisa O’Connell (eds), Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

8 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Michael Steinberg, Enlightenment Interrupted: The Lost Moment of German Idealism and the Reactionary Present (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014). Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Edelstein, The Enlightenment. John Fea, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). E. C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

9 J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 15–16.

10 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment’, in Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony La Vopa (eds), Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1998), pp. 7–28 (pp. 26–8). Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 28–9, 33–40, 54.

11 S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 122. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, p. 103. Richard Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History’, in Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft and Perez Zagorin (eds), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 151–77 (p. 156). Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: A History of England 1603–1714, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 458–63. Porter, The Enlightenment, p. 35. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England’, p. 105. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion, p. 122. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p. 24.

12 Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm’.

13 James D. G. Dunn, ‘Enthusiasm’ (1987), in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. IV, pp. 2804–9. Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995 [1950]), p. 4. Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 11–15. Richard H. Popkin, ‘Predicting, Prophecying, Divining and Foretelling from Nostradamus to Hume’, History of European Ideas, 5:2 (1984), 117–35 (pp. 120–1). Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997 [1971]), p. 141.

14 Anthony La Vopa, ‘The Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60:1/2 (1997), 85–115.

15 Knox, Enthusiasm, p. 2. Adrian Johns, ‘The Physiology of Reading and the Anatomy of Enthusiasm’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 136–70 (p. 145). Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 132–50.

16 Hillel Schwartz, ‘Millenarianism’, Encyclopedia of Religion, 9, pp. 6028–38.

17 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 187. David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 101, 104, 114–15. Knox, Enthusiasm, pp. 140–1.

18 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 10. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration’, pp. 155–60.

19 Michael Heyd, ‘Medical Discourse in Religious Controversy: The Case of the Critique of Enthusiasm on the Eve of the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, 8:1 (Spring 1995), 133–57 (p. 134); and ‘ Be Sober and Reasonable’, p. 4. Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 187. Coward, Stuart Age, p. 460. Knox, Enthusiasm, pp. 5–6.

20 Knox, Enthusiasm, p. 6. Dunn, ‘Enthusiasm’, pp. 2804–5. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 132–50.

21 Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion, p. 48. Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, p. 184. Gerald Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 70. Allison Coudert, ‘Henry More, the Kabbalah, and the Quakers’, in Kroll et al., Philosophy, Science and Religion, pp. 31–67 (p. 47).

22 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 132–50.

23 Clarke Garrett, ‘Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45:1 (1984), 67–81.

24 Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale