Chapter 2 considers the problem of ‘atheism’ in the period before the Civil War, emphasising the extent to which the concept represented an amalgam of the imaginary and the real, to which justice needs to be done. In many ways the discourse of ‘atheism’ was exaggerated, even fantastic. Yet it overlapped with actual instances of irreligion in ways that are teased out in the course of the chapter. The concept of ‘atheism’ made was possible to express disquiet about tendencies in contemporary thought and mores, such as secularism, naturalism and an undue reliance on ‘wit’ and sarcasm. The supposed overlap between atheism and immorality also provided an opportunity for preachers to draw attention to the spiritual shortcomings of the godly to whom they preached.

Chapter 4 deals with atheism after 1660, including the legacy of the Civil War and particularly the influence of Thomas Hobbes. It offers vignettes of such freethinkers as John Wagstaffe, Daniel Scargill, Charles Blount and the Earl of Rochester before confronting the issue of the continuing scarcity of named examples of actual atheists. It considers the case of ‘The Second Spira’ and finds it of questionable validity; on the other hand, it prints verbatim a supposed statement of atheistical principles made in 1700 by an apostate, George Smith. It ends with the early eighteenth-century case of Richard Burridge, an atheist who was prosecuted for blasphemy but who subsequently reformed and capitalised on his dubious reputation.

Chapter 3 considers the extent to which the godly suffered from ‘atheism’ and what they meant by this, giving particular attention to the experience of Robert Boyle, Richard Baxter and John Bunyan. It is argued that such doubts were experienced privately, in contrast to the public irreligion propagated by the true ‘atheists’ who feature in the other chapters of the book, and it is tentatively suggested that such outspoken irreligion was what Christ had in mind in the gospels when He spoke of the unforgiveable ‘Sin against the Holy Ghost’.

Chapter 7 publishes the text of Pitcairneana, MS Eng 1114 in the Houghton Library, Harvard. In it, a spokesman for atheism, ‘Incredulous’, argues against ‘Credulous’, a spokesman for Christian orthodoxy, and makes various points, notably concerning the relationship between spiritual and non-spiritual bodies and the issue of motion being intrinsic to matter; he also argues in favour of the world’s being eternal rather than the result of a divine act of creation and offers a cyclical rather than progressive view of human development. The authors referred to in the dialogue include Samuel Clarke, Henry More, John Toland and Robert Hooke, while the treatise ends by invoking ‘axioms’ in an essentially Newtonian mode.

Chapter 5 gives a detailed account of the trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1696–7. The statements that Aikenhead was accused of making are itemised, and their incendiary and openly blasphemous quality is clear. It is also noteworthy that he made such statements in public and seemed reluctant to retract them. This explains the harsh penalty to which he was subjected, which was the subject of much comment at the time. The case also attracted interest in England, not least from John Locke, who preserved various key documents relating to it. Here, Aikenhead’s sources are investigated, including the dangerous books to which he had access in the university library and elsewhere, and his ingenuity in constructing an irreligious ‘system’ from them is asserted.

Chapter 9 draws some conclusions from the book. By way of reiterating the assurance of atheists on which stress has been laid throughout, it offers the case of Giulio Cesare Vanini, executed at Toulouse for his active promotion of atheistic ideas in 1619. It compares this with the case of Aikenhead but contrasts it with that of Pitcairne, who was more discreet in his propagation of his irreligious views. After assessing other examples of free-thought in early eighteenth-century Scotland, it then turns to the state of affairs in England, where prosecutions for apostacy were haphazard. It is argued that what is in evidence was a degree of complacency on part of the orthodox, as is illustrated by the examples of Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke, and the Conclusion ends by noting hints of atheist opinion in England in the eighteenth century, suggesting that a non-theistic outlook was becoming thinkable as an alternative to orthodoxy.

Chapter 1 considers the fear of atheism that gripped early modern thinkers, assessing its nature and extent and seeking to explain its rationale; in the course of this, its association with trends in the thought of the period such as naturalism, secularism and Deism is considered, as is its supposed link with immoralism. The chapter also asserts that the few well-documented examples of actual atheists that are known from the period were characterised by the ‘assurance’ that they showed in propagating their views, in contrast to the doubts suffered by Christian believers, a point that is illustrated by recourse to the history of emotions. The remainder of the chapter summarises the content of the rest of the book, paying particular attention to the Cerne Abbas enquiry of 1594 and to the apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and of John Eliot in Edinburgh in 1694.

Chapter 6 provides the background to Archibald Pitcairne’s overtly atheist treatise, Pitcairneana, which is published in full in Chapter 7. It surveys Pitcairne’s career, including his meeting with Isaac Newton in 1692, his medical practice and influence, his passionate Episcopalianism and Jacobitism and his hostility to Presbyterianism, his circle of friends, his library and reading, and his Latin versification. Particular attention is given to his religious views, including the heterodox tract that he circulated in print, Epistola Archimedis, which voiced a deeply subversive view of Christian doctrine, and to Pitcairneana, of which the history of the manuscript and its content is given careful scrutiny.

Chapter 8 is about the trial of Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who in 1739 was arraigned before the Vice-Chancellor’s court in Cambridge accused of atheism on the basis of a letter he had written four years earlier, in which he gloried at having reached ‘the Top, the ne plus ultra of atheism’. The case was dominated by the testimony of Mary Richards, who accused Ducket of attempting to seduce her, and less attention was paid to a remarkable defence speech that Ducket made, in which he argued for the right to freedom of thought and private judgement and claimed that an atheist might be a perfectly moral being. Various witnesses were called, most of whom attested to Ducket’s good character, but the court declared him guilty, and he was expelled from the university. It is argued that the case illustrates a degree of complacency, combined with sensationalism, on the part of the authorities, which made its outcome a foregone conclusion. An appendix lists the various accounts of Ducket’s trial.