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Joanna Southcott (1750 – 1814) remains one of the most significant and extraordinary religious figures of her era. In an age of reason and enlightenment, her apocalyptic prophecies attracted tens of thousands of followers, and she captured international attention with her promise to bear a divine child. In this new intellectual biography Matthew Niblett unravels Southcott's writings, her context and her message to demonstrate why the prophetess was such a magnetic figure and to highlight the significance of her role in British religious history. Using a wide range of contemporary sources, this revealing study explains the formation of Southcott's apocalyptic theology, her treatment of the Bible, her relation with the Church, the network of clerical supporters she used and the striking originality of her message. In so doing, this book shines fresh light on religion and the politics of salvation in late Georgian England.
Early industrial England witnessed significant interactions between millenarianism and traditions of radical popular politics, including the first English socialisms. This book provides a detailed archive-based study of Southcottianism from 1815 to 1840 that revises many previous assumptions about this popular millenarian movement.
The Panacea Society was a small religious community of women that was established in England in the early twentieth century. They followed the early nineteenth-century mystic Joanna Southcott, as well other emerging spiritual movements of the day, and developed a remarkable spiritual healing practice that spread around the world. Based on the thousands of letters held in the Society's healing archive, which were sent by ordinary people from around the world, Alastair Lockhart offers a detailed study of the religious ideas of religious seekers from the 1920s to the 1970s. Focusing on Great Britain, Finland, Jamaica, and the US, Lockhart provides unique insight into the personal nature of spirituality in recent times and how ancient and modern spiritual strands were harnessed to the needs of late-modern spiritual seekers. This book addresses debates about the complexity and meaning of the rise or decline of religion in the twentieth century and the processes involved in the formation of popular nontraditional spiritualities. It informs our understanding of global and transnational religions and recent forms of spiritual healing.
Highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. Argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'.
A man admits that, when drunk, he tried to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl; she is arrested and denies they had intercourse, but finally begs God's forgiveness. Then she is publicly hanged alongside her attacker. These events took place in 1644, in Boston, where today they would be viewed with horror. How--and when--did such a complete transformation of our culture's attitudes toward sex occur? In The Origins of Sex, Faramerz Dabhoiwala provides a landmark history, one that will revolutionize our understanding of the origins of sexuality in modern Western culture. For millennia, sex had been strictly regulated by the Church, the state, and society, who vigorously and brutally attempt...
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.
In the late sixteenth century, English merchants and diplomats ventured into the eastern Mediterranean to trade directly with the Turks, the keepers of an important emerging empire in the Western Hemisphere, and these initial exchanges had a profound effect on English literature. While the theater investigated representations of religious and ethnic identity in its portrayals of Turks and Muslims, poetry, Miriam Jacobson argues, explored East-West exchanges primarily through language and the material text. Just as English markets were flooded with exotic goods, so was the English language awash in freshly imported words describing items such as sugar, jewels, plants, spices, paints, and dyes...
The key aim of this volume is to demonstrate ways in which an understanding of history can be used to inform present-day transport and mobility policies. This is not to say that history repeats itself, or that every contemporary transport dilemma has an historical counterpart: rather, the contributors to this book argue that in many contexts of transport planning a better understanding of the context and consequences of past decisions and processes could lead to more effective policy decisions. Collectively the authors explore the ways in which the methods and approaches of historical research may be applied to contemporary transport and policy issues across a wide range of transport modes and contexts. By linking two bodies of academic research that for the most part remain separate this volume helps to inform current transport and mobility policies and to stimulate innovative new research that links studies of both past and present mobilities.
This collection provides readers with a concise, high-level introduction to the field of feminist and gender biblical criticism. It consists of 36 chapters which tackle a wide range of new theoretical and methodological movements.
Charts the transformation in the way people thought about democracy in the North Atlantic region in the years between the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1848.