Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism

by S.J. Barnett

Barnett traces the Christian critique of the Church and its history in Protestant (English) and Catholic (Italian) thought from the reformation to the enlightenment. More than one hundred and fifty years of bitter polemic between the two great confessions and their religious dissidents produced an unprecedented, comparative historical and sociological anticlericalism. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, English dissenting thought was pregnant with a devastating critique of the church, which came to be termed the deist view of Church by 1700 the cornerstone of high "enlightenment anticlerical thought" was in ascent.

197 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 1999