Although he was one of the most eminent philosophers of the early fourteenth century, Walter Burley has seldom attracted much attention for his contributions to political theory. To some extent, this neglect may be blamed on the unfortunate history of the dissemination of Burley's major political work, the Commentarius in VIII Libros Politicorum Aristotelis (composed between 1338 and 1343). While widely circulated during the later Middle Ages, a fact indicated by the large number of extant manuscripts, the Commentarius did not follow Burley's other commentaries on Aristotle's writings into print during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. To my knowledge, no satisfactory explanation has ever been adduced for this lacuna, but it has not been rectified to the present day; a printed edition of the Commentarius, based either on a single manuscript or a critical examination of all the manuscripts, has yet to appear. This absence of a printed version of the text is especially inexplicable in view of the rarity of commentaries on the Politics prior to the end of the fourteenth century.

Edmund Pyle's oft-quoted account, though particularly caustic, is not unrepresentative of the views held by both contemporaries and historians about the duke of Newcastle as ecclesiastical minister. In the most comprehensive modern assessment of his role, Norman Sykes, while admitting that Newcastle was anxious “to fill the bench with good prelates,” portrays him as weak, vacillating, and incompetent. Moreover, and of more relevance to the concerns of this article, Sykes emphasizes the extent of Newcastle's power and influence in church affairs: like many of the duke's contemporaries he agrees with Pyle that Newcastle not only enjoyed virtually unquestioned control of Crown patronage, but that he also encroached on that of the lord chancellor and the bishops.

Slightly more than two decades ago in an article entitled “Scientists and society: the saints preserved” we began an historiographical intervention into the debate about the social origins of modern science. In that 1971 review essay we argued that recent work on the Restoration latitudinarians, particularly the important contribution of Barbara Shapiro, did not adequately account for the role played in latitudinarian thought by political and ecclesiastical interests. The time has come to return to the discussion. This occasion has been presented by the publication of a book of essays written for a conference held in 1987 at the Clark Library, entitled Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, and edited by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin. The volume constitutes one of the few recent contributions to an important debate about science and religion that was noisy in the 1970s and largely ignored during the Tory backlash of the 1980s. But the times are finally changing, and revitalization may now be occurring in British cultural and intellectual history. The newly edited volume stands at the cusp of the revitalization. It struggles to move forward to fresher approaches toward culture, i.e. toward the view that texts require historical and linguistic location. Yet the volume is trapped by those few contributors who are still wedded to conventions and attitudes now largely confined to the high churchmen of the 1980s.

The volume revolves around two themes: the nature of liberal English Protestantism after 1660 and the contested role of science in that mental and social construct. These are themes basic to English historiography in this century, if not before, and they are very much associated with the writings of Robert Merton and Christopher Hill. Their work largely focused on the mid-century Puritans; in the 1970s attention turned to the latitudinarians and their scientific associates, from Boyle to Newton.