By Sarah Ellenzweig
The Fringes of trust is the 1st literary learn of freethinking and spiritual skepticism within the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig goals to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing literature of English freethinking has been neglected since it abruptly supported elements of institutional faith. studying works via John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan rapid, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking culture that was once suspicious of printed faith but usually strongly against the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its legislation. through exposing the contradictory and risky prestige of different types like trust and doubt this publication participates within the greater argument in Enlightenment studies—as good as in present scholarship at the of modernity extra generally—-that faith isn't really so easily left at the back of within the shift from the pre-modern to the trendy international.
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Additional resources for The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760
Sample text
The Ranters, in other words, though heretical believers, were inspired ones—men of grace and spirit—whereas the Restoration libertines, however ambivalently, were undeniably skeptical doubters. The link between the aristocratic freethinkers of the Restoration and the Civil War sects can also obscure the knotty problem of status. ”24 It is in this important sense that Rochester’s freethinking is as much a reaction against the upheavals of the Civil Wars as it is a continuation of those radical tendencies, an insight that has a way of getting lost in Hill’s de- Rochester, Blount, and the Faith of Unbelief 37 lineation of Rochester’s radical Ranter heritage.
Behn’s attraction to freethinking is complicated, I argue, by her sense that religious heterodoxy is inextricably bound up with male attempts at sexual conquest. Behn thus insists that we bring an awareness of gender politics to our assessment of freethinking doctrine, asking us to proceed cautiously in dismantling the traditional categories of love and faith. This caution, however, is itself always informed by a prior skepticism, one that leads her by the end of her career to explore the philosophy of freethinking as separate from the critique of Christian sexual morality.
I will pursue this aim through a reassessment of recent approaches to late seventeenth-century religious radicalism. The first approach I consider, characteristic of the research of Christopher Hill, has been to understand the freethinking of the 1670s as a continuation, in modified form, of the radical sectarianism of the Interregnum. Hill thus sees a link between the sexual and religious libertinism of the Ranters, for example, and that of the Restoration rakes. 19 Hill’s analysis is persuasive on several counts: not only does it provide a useful reminder of the irreligious tendencies of the enthusiastic sects; it also brings into focus that crucial and largely neglected aspect of the rakes, namely, their furtive religious inclinations.