Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism

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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 150 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 17th century, English dissenting thought was pregnant with a critique of the Church, which came to be termed the Deist view of Church history: by 1700 the cornerstone of high Enlightenment anticlerical thought was in ascent. This work is intended for departments of history (courses in early modern European history, intellectual history), religious studies and philosophy.