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“The history of atheism used to be confined to a narrow and isolated province of intellectual history. This volume shows how far and how excitingly it has spread. These authors show how closely belief and unbelief were perennially intertwined for Europeans, and how, in their understanding of their global encounters, their changing societies, and their literary cultures, ‘atheism’ was an indispensable category which early modern Europeans used to understand their world and themselves.”
--Professor Alec Ryrie, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham, UK
Beginning with the premise that religious and non-religious identities were fluid, overlapping phenomena rather than static, binary conditions, this timely edited collection challenges the traditional notion that atheism was an acute intellectual innovation of Western modernity by rethinking its multifarious pre-modern manifestations and impact in Brazil, China, England, France, Italy, New England, Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Transylvania. The book reveals the entangled intellectual, cultural, and experiential dynamics of atheism, which was not only an abstract philosophical or theological category, but also a lived phenomenon involving emotional, sensory, and bodily meaning across European and non-European worlds. Rich materials including manuscript diaries, correspondence, sermons, dramaturgical texts, and colonial writings evince diverse attitudes towards atheism and offer glimpses into atheistic perspectives. The book achieves pioneering insights by gathering emergent and world-leading researchers whose scholarship investigates atheism from multiple interdisciplinary vantage points, including history, theology, and literature as well as philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.
Patrick Seamus McGhee is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham, UK. He has published in
Atlantic Studies,
Studies in Church History, and
Exchange, and has co-edited a Special Issue of the
Journal of Early Modern History entitled ‘Global Protestantisms’ (2024).
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Histories and Horizons of Atheism.- Chapter 2: Rethinking the Boundary between Medieval and Modern: Atheism before the Word ‘Atheism’.- Chapter 3: Pre-Columbian Atheists? The Reception of Missionary Sources on the Supposed Atheism of the Natives of Brazil in Luís de Molina..- Chapter 4: An Atheist Transformation of Aristotelianism in Sixteenth-Century Transylvania – The Case of Christian Francken (ca. 1552 – after 1611).- Chapter 5: Skilled in the ‘Monuments of Antiquity’: Anti-Atheism and the History of Ancient Thought in Several Seventeenth-Century Cambridge University Lectures, 1623-1660.- Chapter 6: Theist, Atheist or Intellectually Childish? Thinking China in Early Modern Europe.- Chapter 7: Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: Some Reflections and Additions.- Chapter 8: Anti-Atheism and Intellectual Change in England, c. 1650-1720: Between Ancients and Moderns.- Chapter 9: The Atheism Spectrum – Forms of Atheism in Restoration Drama.- Chapter 10: Locke’s Notion of Atheism.- Chapter 11: Atheism, Women, and the Body in New England, c. 1600–c. 1800.- Chapter 12: Jeremy Bentham on the Truth of Christianity.-Chapter 13: The Trace of Transcendence: Expanding Naturalism BeyondAtheism.
About the author
Patrick Seamus McGhee is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham, UK. He has published in
Atlantic Studies,
Studies in Church History, and
Exchange, and has co-edited a Special Issue of the
Journal of Early Modern History entitled ‘Global Protestantisms’ (2024).
Summary
Beginning with the premise that religious and non-religious identities were fluid, overlapping phenomena rather than static, binary conditions, this timely edited collection challenges the traditional notion that atheism was an acute intellectual innovation of Western modernity by rethinking its multifarious pre-modern manifestations and impact in Brazil, China, England, France, Italy, New England, Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Transylvania. The book reveals the entangled intellectual, cultural, and experiential dynamics of atheism, which was not only an abstract philosophical or theological category, but also a lived phenomenon involving emotional, sensory, and bodily meaning across European and non-European worlds. Rich materials including manuscript diaries, correspondence, sermons, dramaturgical texts, and colonial writings evince diverse attitudes towards atheism and offer glimpses into atheistic perspectives. The book achieves pioneering insights by gathering emergent and world-leading researchers whose scholarship investigates atheism from multiple interdisciplinary vantage points, including history, theology, and literature as well as philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.
