Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648-1715

This is an original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William J. Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the church's historical scholarship, social science, pastoral care and political practice amounted not to a culturally backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalization. In seeking to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided over what it meant in practice.

About the Author

William J. Bulman is an assistant professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he teaches European history and global studies. He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Princeton University, where he received the Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellowship and other honors. Between 2009 and 2012 he held research fellowships at Vanderbilt and Yale. His doctoral work was supported by the Mellon Foundation and the US Department of Education, and in 2012 he was among the two youngest scholars in eight disciplines to be awarded a Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs Grant from the Historical Society and the Templeton Foundation. His articles on the intellectual, religious, political, and cultural history of England and its empire have appeared in Past and Present, The Journal of British Studies, History Compass, and other venues. In addition to the themes covered in Anglican Enlightenment, his current research examines the changing nature of political practice and decision-making in the British Atlantic world between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is also co-editor of God in the Enlightenment (with Robert G. Ingram, 2016).