Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-253) and index.

Preliminary Material -- CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER TWO: THEORY, NARRATIVE, AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS -- CHAPTER THREE: THOMAS VAUGHAN AND THE ALCHEMICAL WORLD -- CHAPTER FOUR: ALCHEMY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ENTHUSIASM -- CHAPTER FIVE: POLITICAL ENTHUSIASM: THE QUAKERS AND RELIGIOUS RADICALISM -- CHAPTER SIX: PNEUMATOLOGY AND MECHANICAL ENTHUSIASM -- CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

This volume examines the role of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, in discrediting certain religious and philosophical movements of the seventeenth century by branding them as \'enthusiastical\' (the result of psychological imbalance issuing in impaired judgement and cognition). More's views are distinguished from his \'enthusiastical\' opponents — Alchemists, Quakers, and Mechanical Philosophers — by looking at the way in which he dialectically employs various speech genres to describe religious meaning and to evoke in his readers attitudes and feelings confirming that meaning. More is presented as offering a consistent ideal of the religiously meaningful life, protecting it from various forms of intellectual corruption. More's paradoxical ways of polemicizing are explained while at the same time the author provides insight into such diverse themes as the connection between Hermeticism, Cartesianism, and religious radicalism.