During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Scotland and England produced such well-known figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke. Ireland’s contribution to this revolution in Western thought has received much less attention. Offering a corrective to the view that Ireland was intellectually stagnant during this period, The Irish Enlightenment considers a range of artists, writers, and philosophers who were full participants in the pan-European experiment that forged the modern world. Michael Brown explores the ideas and innovations percolating in political pamphlets, economic and religious tracts, and literary works. John Toland, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and other luminaries, he shows, participated in a lively debate about the capacity of humans to create a just society. In a nation recovering from confessional warfare, religious questions loomed large. How should the state be organized to allow contending Christian communities to worship freely? Was the public confession of faith compatible with civil society? In a society shaped by opposing religious beliefs, who is enlightened and who is intolerant? The Irish Enlightenment opened up the possibility of a tolerant society, but it was short-lived. Divisions concerning methodological commitments to empiricism and rationalism resulted in an increasingly antagonistic conflict over questions of religious inclusion. This fracturing of the Irish Enlightenment eventually destroyed the possibility of civilized, rational discussion of confessional differences. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland again entered a dark period of civil unrest whose effects were still evident in the late twentieth century.

The religious history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestantism was marked by a twofold movement. On the one hand there were attempts to consolidate and, if necessary, to reaffirm the heritage of the Reformation; on the other hand, we meet a growing critical evaluation of the legacy of mainstream orthodox thought, which could lead to a process of gradual renewal and reorientation, but also to forms of more radical and controversial criticism. Conservative as well as critical tendencies can be discerned in the religious landscape on both sides of the North Sea. In spite of differences in the historical framework and spiritual culture, the developments in Great-Britain and on the Continent often present remarkable parallels, and the water of the North Sea was not too deep for creative interaction. This volume contains a number of essays which deal with various aspects of English and Dutch church history and theology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Special attention is given to the problems surrounding the Calvinist doctrine of predestination; to English Puritanism and its impact on the Netherlands; to Jewish-Christian relations and polemics in the seventeenth century; to seventeenth-century millenarianism, in particular in the circle of the Cambridge Platonists; to the attitute of Dutch Reformed theologians to the Church of England, to eighteenth-century English and Dutch orientalist studies and to the development of enlightened ideas in the circles of English and Dutch Protestantism.