Plainly stated, this book examines the role of music in the early modern subject's sensory experience of divinity, by exploring ways in which the idea of music was employed in the written transmission of elite ideas by four university-educated individuals on the fringes of the supposed mainstream of English thought, roughly between 1650 and 1750. While formulated within an unquestionably elite and normative society, the musical reflections of these individuals expressed alternative and often uncustomary conceptions of God, the world and the human psyche.

Music was not the sole foundation of these thinkers’ discourses. Indeed, none of them was, or indeed is now, generally known as a ‘musician’, at least, not in any of the usual senses of that term. They wrote in theological, devotional, antiquarian and ‘scientific’ contexts that often have no obvious relation to music at all. As such, this book's concerns must extend significantly beyond the musical. Yet the premise to be adopted is that music is always potentially present in their discourse, emerging as a crucial form of mediation between states: exoteric and esoteric, material and spiritual, outer and inner, public and private, rational and mystical.

This enquiry will lead us in directions that may at times seem surprising and even anachronistic. It is rarely questioned that the period in focus is traditionally celebrated as one of major transformation in British thought: the ousting of over-zealous religious enthusiasm by a more ‘reasonable’ approach to belief and worship, the culminating glories of the Scientific Revolution, the origins and early unfolding of the Enlightenment, the emergence of a politically open, commercially driven public sphere. The increasingly characteristic temper of the contemporary mindset has been identified by many epithets, including polite, rational, reasonable, secular, worldly and even satirical. All these qualities have been treated as antithetical to, and often leading to the destruction of, the traditions on which my protagonists drew, and thereby their approach potentially appears hopelessly outdated. Paradoxically, however, in privileging the human spirit and its identification with the mysterious other, their chal-lenges to dominant ideological currents of their times coincide with the future stirrings of Romanticism. If one considers them solely through the traditional ‘progress’ narratives of British early modernity, my subjects simultaneously appear archaic and improbably prescient.

Rather than relying on such stereotypes, the aim is to address this area of thought on its own terms.