Review Article : An Age of Iron? Recent Works on Early Modern European Social and Economic HistoryJohn Walter and Roger Schofield, eds, Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; xiv + 335 pp.; £35.00. John Komlos, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy. An Anthropometric History, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989; xvii + 325 pp.; US$45.00. Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; xvi + 297 pp.; £27.50. James R. Farr, Hands of Honor. Artisans and Their World in Drjon, 1550-1650, Ithaca NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1988; xiii + 298 pp.; US$39.95. Philip Benedict, ed., Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, London, Unwin Hyman, 1989; xiv + 251 pp.; £30.00. Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of Honor. Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France, Ithaca NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1989; xiv + 223 pp. ; US$30.75. R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Culture and Education 1500-1800, London, Longman, 1988; ix + 266 pp.; £15.95 hardback, £7.95 paperback

1991 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-550
Author(s):  
David Parrott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern France

‘Freethinking’ and ‘Freedom of Thought’ in eighteenth-century Britain

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
The Social ◽  
Freedom Of Thought

ABSTRACTIn early modern Europe, religious heterodoxy and intellectual inquiry posed serious challenges to the authority of centralizing forces both secular and ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, these dangerous developments had been driven by those individuals whom eighteenth-century writers had adopted as ‘culture heroes’ for an age increasingly self-conscious of its own enlightened status. In Britain, the newly established order defended itself against the scepticism and moral determinism of ‘freethinkers’ by upholding a religious and moral order based on liberty. But ‘freethinkers’ such as Anthony Collins were themselves the inheritors of, and propagandists for, the seventeenth-century revolution in science which underpinned the ideology being wielded against them. Their challenge elicited from Edmund Law an argument which co-opted their epistemology to ground the familiar metaphysics of liberty associated with the Newtonian position of Samuel Clarke. Where ‘freethinking’ had been perceived as a dangerous solvent of the social order, ‘freedom of thought’, within limits that were themselves a leading subject of debate in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, could be upheld as consistent with the demands of political society.

Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society

1991 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 659
Author(s):  
Anne Hardy ◽  
John Walter ◽  
Roger S. Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Social
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