This volume has begun the work of reinterpreting the works of an important but neglected group of writers known as the English deists. Nineteenth-century scholars, working with a paradigm of belief and unbelief, often discussed the work of these writers in terms which they would not have recognized. This study, in contrast, has begun to read their achievements more contextually. It has questioned the assumption that these writers had single identities and suggested that they were aware of multiple deisms as well as other forms of heterodoxy and free thought.

Consistent with this, the writers known as the English deists were not atheists or deists in an exclusive or final sense, but controversialists working with various publics for a range of purposes in a period in which ‘the public’ was being constructed. They maintained a range of personae in different social roles and when addressing different audiences. While allowing for the impact of underground materials and radical ideas circulating in Europe on these writers, it is important to underline the multiple negotiations which were incumbent on them in various social roles. Their social and political locations compelled these writers to advance their ideas with a degree of subterfuge, and they advanced radical ideas without developing them fully. Nor were these writers as free to pursue ‘free inquiries’ as they pretended. There were also problems, as Bentley, Berkeley and Wesley noted, about the way in which they combined free inquiry with prejudice. In so far as these writers were involved with disbelief, this involvement was transitional and produced in them partiality and animus rather than doubt. It was historically specific, and not self-evident to later generations, for whom the order of the crucial issues was different. In Early Enlightenment many readers could sympathize with these writers’ rejection of superstition and priestcraft, without concluding that Christianity should be given up.

In this volume I have sought to dispose of a series of myths which impede our understanding of the works of these writers and the controversies to which they gave rise.