Introduction

Contemporary debates about the Enlightenment have reawakened interest in early critics of Christianity and underground heterodoxy. In this context the writers known to historians as the English deists deserve to be read without the legacy of prejudice which nineteenth-century critics brought to their texts. Charles Blount (1654–93), John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1679–1729), Matthew Tindal (1656–1733), Thomas Woolston (1669–1733), Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), Thomas Chubb (1679–1747), Thomas Morgan (d. 1743) and Peter Annet (1693–1769) were more complex and nuanced figures than much of the historiography suggests, and also significant agents of reform in a range of important areas.

These writers have proven more difficult to interpret than general works on the Enlightenment tend to imply. The term ‘the English deists’ itself is controversial, and is used here as a label for constellationally related writers whose historical significance depends on contextually related publications. This interpretation, which I introduced in my first volume, The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment (2009), and further elaborate in the present volume, directs research away from the over-unified conceptions of the older historiography, which tended to assume that the English deists were the deists in England. More recently, revisionist historiography has tended to argue either that these writers were Protestant Christians, and so not perhaps deists in any substantive sense, or that some of them (Blount, Toland, Collins, Tindal) were more radical than the term ‘deist’ suggests. My work, in contrast, introduces a more contextual interpretation which emphasizes the multiple personae these writers exercised and the diversity of their contributions to the Enlightenment.