Publications

Links are to vendors or to the online version published by  the relevant publisher. Those without online access to articles, or to library copies, should feel free to email me for a version. For my non-academic writing, please click here.

Books

Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2015; paperback 2017), 700pp

Named as a Book of the Year for 2016 by the Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews:
1. Journal of Historical Geography (2016) [Robert Mayhew]
2. Reviews in History (2016) [William Bulman], and my response
3. Isis (2016) [Dirk van Miert]
4. Renaissance Quarterly (2016) [Johann Sommerville]
5. Journal of British Studies (2017) [Ted McCormick]
6. History of Humanities (2017) [Henk Nellen]
7. English Historical Review (2017) [Diego Lucci]
8. American Historical Review (2017) [John Henry]
9. HOPOS (2017) [Mogens Laerke]
10. Erudition and the Republic of Letters (2018) [Anthony Ossa-Richardson]
11. European Journal of Philosophy (2018) [Susan James]
12. Times Literary Supplement (2018) [Alastair Hamilton]
13. Asclepio (2018) [Pablo Toribio – Spanish]
14. Intellectual History Review (2019) [Part of themed discussion, ‘From Ancient Theology to Civil Religion’, Francesco Borghesi]

Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities, edited by Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford University Press, 2019)

With contributions from: Simon Ditchfield, Aurélien Girard, Anthony Grafton, Nicholas Hardy, Dmitri Levitin, Jan Loop, Scott Mandelbrote, Madeline McMahon, Jean-Louis Quantin, and Arnoud Visser.

Forthcoming books

The Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming 2021).

ed., with Ian Maclean, The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in Early Modern Europe: Comparative Approaches (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming, 2021).

Published articles/book chapters

‘Newton on the Rules of Philosophising and Hypotheses: New Evidence, New Conclusions’, ISIS, 2021.

‘Isaac Newton’s “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum”: its Purpose in Historical Context’, Annals of Science, 2021.

‘Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: a comparative overview’, in Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: an episode in the history of the humanities, ed. N. Hardy and D. Levitin, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford University Press, 2019)

(with S. Mandelbrote), ‘Becoming heterodox in seventeenth-century Cambridge: the case of Isaac Newton. With an edition of Newton’s divinity disputation’ (30,000 words), in Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: an episode in the history of the humanities, ed. N. Hardy and D. Levitin, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford University Press, 2019)

‘Teaching Political Thought in the Restoration Divinity Faculty: Avant-Garde Episcopacy, the Two Kingdoms and Christian Liberty’, in Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie, ed. Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, and John Marshall (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2019).

‘Early modern experimental philosophy: a non-Anglocentric overview’, in Experiment, Speculation, and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter Anstey and Alberto Vanzo (New York: Routledge, 2019). [PDF] [I had always hoped that one of the functions of this essay would be as a useful overview for students. But since the volume in which it appears is rather expensive and not always available even in libraries, and since it employs an unusual citation system that makes cross-referencing difficult, I am providing this final draft as a freely available download. However, I would ask that all citations of this essay in academic publications refer to the printed version, including specific page numbers].

‘What was the comparative history of religion in seventeenth-century Europe (and Beyond)? Pagan Monotheism/Pagan Animism, from T’ien to Tylor’, in Regimes of comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, ed. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2018)

‘”Radical” history writing in 1650s England: the case of John Beale’, in Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform, ed. Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017)

‘Newton and scholastic philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Science, 49 (2016)

‘Egyptology, the limits of antiquarianism, and the origins of conjectural history, c. 1680–1740′, History of European Ideas, 41 (2015)

‘”Made up from many experimentall notions”. The Society of Apothecaries, medical humanism, and the rhetoric of experience in 1630s London’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 70 (2014)

‘Rethinking English physico-theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665)’, Early Science and Medicine, 19 (2014)

‘The experimentalist as humanist: Robert Boyle on the history of philosophy’, Annals of Science, 71 (2014)

‘John Spencer’s De legibus Hebraeorum (1683–85) and ‘enlightened’ sacred history: a new interpretation’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 76 (2013)

‘Edmund Halley and the Eternity of the World Revisited’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 67 (2013)

‘John Locke’, in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

‘From sacred history to the history of religion: Pagans, Jews and Christians in European Historiography from the Reformation to “Enlightenment”‘, Historical Journal, 55 (2012)

‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church-State Relationship’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011)

‘Reconsidering John Sergeant’s Attacks on Locke’s Essay’, Intellectual History Review, 20 (2010)

Forthcoming

‘Newton on the Rules of Philosophising and Hypotheses: New Evidence, New Conclusions’, ISIS, forthcoming, 2021.

‘From Palestine to Göttingen (via India): Hebrew Matthew and the Origins of the Synoptic Problem’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, forthcoming, 2021.

‘Newton the Orientalist: the Historical Assumptions behind the General Scholium’, in Isaac Newton’s General Scholium, ed. S. Ducheyne, S. Mandelbrote and S. Snobelen (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

‘Attitudes to ancient philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of the Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution, ed. D. Jalobeanu and D. Miller (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming).

‘Early Modern Biblical Criticism’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, forthcoming, 2021.

In preparation

(with Anthony Milton), University Disputations and Academic Freedom in Early Modern Europe 

Reviews

P. Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), English Historical Review, 132 (2017) 

H. Nellen, Hugo Grotius: A lifelong struggle for peace in Church and State, 1583–1645 [Trans. by J. C. Grayson of Hugo de Groot, een leven in strijd om de vrede, 1583–1645 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2007)] (Leiden: Brill, 2015), Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (2016)

G. Tarantino, Republicanism, Sinophilia, and Historical Writing. Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his History of England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), Intellectual History Review (2014)

S. Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Early Science and Medicine, 18 (2013)

Francis Lodwick, On Language, Theology, and Utopia, eds., Felicity Henderson and William Poole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013)

V. Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity and Enlightenment: Interpretations of Locke (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), Journal for the History of Philosophy, 51 (2013)