The Enlightenment is in a state of profound flux. Scholars are, for the most part, resisting the long-established practice of pronouncing with certainty that the Enlightenment was a single ideology or temperament of the mind that characterises a host of thinkers from a variety of countries and backgrounds. Increasingly, the Enlightenment is seen as existing in different forms in different locations and, indeed, in various incarnations such as radical, conservative or moderate Enlightenments. One of the results of this new and nuanced Enlightenment is a reconsideration of religion and religious belief in the eighteenth century. Many monographs and articles have redrawn the secular, if not atheistic, face of the Enlightenment with lines of genuine religious sentiment and shades of sincere worship. In light of such research, the launch of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, a new annual journal devoted to communicating scholarship addressing ‘religion and religious attitudes … during the age of Enlightenment … the impact of the Enlightenment on religion, religious thought, and religious experiences; and …the ways religion informed Enlightenment ideas and values’ (p. 349) is a welcomed addition to the conversation.

The premier issue of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment embodies its goal of being an interdisciplinary publication. Of the twelve articles, eight are written by English literary scholars (one of these is co-authored with a psychologist), two are authored by historians, one is by a postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Dissenting Studies, and one is by a philosopher. The topics covered include: surprise in God's creation, eighteenth-century conduct books, aspects of Methodism, ritual Jewish bathing, usury, political economy and the Scottish Kirk, Irish challenges to deism, John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, a ‘statistical survey of certain syntactical and grammatical features’ (p. 258) of Robert Morehead's sermon to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo, Leibniz's interpretation of Chinese culture, and early nineteenth-century schools for Native American girls. While the limits of space preclude a detailed review of every article, I should like to comment on those that I found most fascinating. In ‘The primitive Church, the primitive mind, and Methodism in the eighteenth century’, Kathryn Stasio and Michael J. Stasio offer an innovative reading of Methodism's success by considering its ‘connection to the primitive church and its appeals to the primitive mind as explained by the theory of evolutionary psychology’ (p. 60). They argue that John Wesley's belief that the Anglican Church had embraced too much reason caused his desire to return to a more primitive Christianity. This appealed to many converts, Stasio and Stasio claim, because the human mind, in evolutionary terms, was still primitive and sought emotional experiences in their Church (as opposed to the rationality and intellectualism of Anglicanism) and reciprocity amongst the congregational members. Methodists, it is further proposed, signalled their belonging through ‘ritual displays’ such as ‘swooning, crying, love feasts’ (p. 76) and other examples as a way to identify themselves to like-minded people, just as a peacock displays his tail to potential mates. I was intrigued by Scott Breuninger's article ‘Irish clergy and the deist controversy: two episodes in the early British Enlightenment’ because of the overlap with my own research. Breuninger suggests that an identifiable ‘Irish’ response to deism existed, one that found expression in ‘scientific notions as the foundation’ for the ‘defense of religious mysteries’ (p. 226). While an important and compelling argument, one I hope to see fleshed out in further work, I did stumble over some of Breuninger's assertions. How did John Toland's Christianity not mysterious draw ‘heavily upon the ideas of natural philosophy’ (p. 199)? I agree that in the book Toland discusses briefly the knowable attributes of material objects – specifically his writing desk – but outside of this reference explicit discussion of natural philosophy is difficult to discern. I wonder also if the intellectual debt that Anthony Collins owed to Toland is overstated. Collins was quite clear in his writings that he was an individual thinker and not Toland's parrot. Rosemary Dixon's ‘Sermon publishing, clerical reading, and John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, 1646–1750’, takes the position that Wilkins's Ecclesiastes should be seen as an answer to Francis Bacon's plea in the Advancement of learning for a catalogue of the most useful works in divinity. Dixon argues that Wilkins's book is part of the Enlightenment's penchant for producing reference works that allowed for systematic study of particular topics, in this case sermons. My only criticism of this excellent article is that I would like to have seen the argument tied more closely to recent work in Enlightenment dictionaries and encyclopaedias, such as that found in Richard Yeo (ed.) Encyclopaedic visions: scientific dictionaries and Enlightenment culture (Cambridge 2001).

Like any edited collection, the quality of articles is mixed and some do a better job of addressing the themes of the journal than do others. For the most part, however, the articles are very engaging, although few offer truly unique perspectives into the relationship between religion and Enlightenment. This is not to say that the authors do not have very valuable arguments to make. Rather, their collective writing is sparse with insight as to the question of how religion existed in the Enlightenment as an intellectual phenomenon. The authors do address religion and theological issues that occurred in the long eighteenth century, but this is not the same thing. I am hopeful that future issues of this new journal will focus more on the former query. If so, Religion in the Age of Enlightenment will have something important to offer to the scholarly community.