The Enlightenment and religion: The myths of modernity

• Acknowledgements
• p. vii

• Introduction: The Enlightenment and modernity
• p. 1

• The rationale of this book
• p. 1

• The structure of this book
• p. 7

• 1
• The myth of Enlightenment deism
• p. 11

• The myth of the deist movement
• p. 11

• The deism myth and modern historians
• p. 22

• The myth and the historical record
• p. 30

• The myth and the construction of modernity
• p. 37

• 2
• Historians, religion and the historical record
• p. 45

• The origins of Enlightenment anticlericalism
• p. 45

• John Toland, Pierre Bayle and the problem of influence
• p. 52

• Enlightenment from within or without Christianity?
• p. 57

• The elite and the written record
• p. 62

• Scaremongering, public opinion and the construction of the deism scare
• p. 68

• 3
• The English deist movement: a case study in the construction of a myth
• p. 81

• Post-Restoration context
• p. 81

• Deists and Dissent confused
• p. 87

• John Toland and Christianity not Mysterious
• p. 94

• Early modern politico-religious propagandists and modern historians
• p. 102

• Dissent and Englightenment
• p. 121

• 4
• France: the revolt of democratic Christianity and the rise of public opinion
• p. 130

• Bourbons, Huguenots and Jansenists
• p. 131

• The Nouvelles ecclesiastiques and Bourbon miscalculation
• p. 136

• The revolt of the 1750s
• p. 144

• Popular victory against the Jesuits and the call for toleration
• p. 150

• The final decline of the absolutist dream
• p. 159

• 5
• Italy: Roman 'tyranny' and radical Catholic opposition
• p. 168

• Jansenism and Catholic Englightenment
• p. 168

• Anti-curial polemic and its context
• p. 171

• Regalism and Jansenism
• p. 177

• The temporal imperative: Roman theology and politics fused
• p. 182

• Radical Jansenism 1770s-1790s
• p. 189

• 6
• The 'public sphere' and the hidden life of ideas
• p. 201

• The hidden life of ideas
• p. 201

• The 'public sphere' and the top-down model of intellectual change
• p. 204

• Anachronism and toleration
• p. 215

• Appendix
• Indicative bibliography of Protestant thought on natural religion
• p. 222

• Selected bibliography
• p. 225

• Index
• p. 239