Proceedings of a conference held Mar. 14-15, 2008 at St. Hugh's College, Oxford.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Nature, Revelation, History: The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750 / Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson -- Styles of Heterodoxy and Intellectual Achievement: Grotius and Arminianism / Hans W. Blom -- Human and Divine Justice in the Works of Grotius and the Socinians / Sarah Mortimer -- ‘The Kingdom of Darkness’: Hobbes and Heterodoxy / Justin Champion -- Henry Stubbe, Robert Boyle and the Idolatry of Nature / Martin Mulsow -- Heterodoxy and Sinology: Isaac Vossius, Robert Hooke and the Early Royal Society’s Use of Sinology / William Poole -- ‘Lovers of Truth’ in Pierre Bayle’s and John Locke’s Thought / S.-J. Savonius-Wroth -- Spinoza and the Religious Radical Enlightenment / Jonathan Israel -- Between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Italian Culture in the Early 1700s: Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia Doria / Enrico Nuzzo -- Conyers Middleton: The Historical Consequences of Heterodoxy / Brian Young -- David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) and the End of Modern Eusebianism / Richard Serjeantson -- Bibliography -- Index.

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It is too often assumed that religious heterodoxy before the Enlightenment led inexorably to intellectual secularisation. Challenging that assumption, this book expands the scope of the enquiry, hitherto concentrated on the relation between heterodoxy and natural philosophy, to include political thought, moral philosophy and the writing of history. Individual chapters are devoted to Grotius, the Dutch Remonstrants and Socinianism, to Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Dutch Collegiants and English Unitarians, Giambattista Vico, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume. In their opening essay the editors argue that the critical problems for both Protestants and Catholics arose from destabilising the relation between the spheres of Nature and Revelation, and the adoption of an increasingly historical approach both to natural religion and to the Scriptual basis of Revelation. Contributors include: Hans Blom, Justin Champion, Jonathan Israel, Martin Mulsow, Enrico Nuzzo, William Poole, Sami-Juhani Savonius, Richard Serjeantson, and Brian Young.