A Political Biography of John Toland
Michael Brown
Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies
978 1 85196 914 2: 216x138mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 683 7
John Toland was notorious. Condemned by the Middlesex Grand Jury and the Irish parliament for authoring Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), he was to spend much of his career on the heterodox fringes of intellectual life in Britain and beyond. Yet he was also an intimate of a series of influential politicians, from Robert Harley to William Penn and Sophie Charlotte, the Queen of Prussia, and played a crucial part in the Hanoverian succession of 1714. A respected antagonist in the European Republic of Letters, he unnerved John Locke and engaged Leibniz in debate. A formidable scholar, he was to formulate a canon of republican thought, including editions of James Harrington and John Milton. A pamphleteer, a polemicist and a prankster of the first order, modern scholarship has struggled to position his eclectic and often esoteric writings within the debates of his day. This study is the first to fully recount his remarkable biography, and to situate his writings fully within the controversies that sparked and shaped them.
Taking seriously Toland’s injunction that to know more, one should look at his writings, Brown draws together his idiosyncratic and often un-attributed publications, along with the scattered manuscript traces that remain, to uncover a complex and often conflicted figure, who fought to recast established authority in church and state. This biography follows Toland through his peregrinations across Europe, setting his ambitions and failures in the context of wider intellectual trends and political circumstance. It also grounds him in his origins; an Irish Catholic by birth, educated in Scottish Presbyterianism and committed to an Anglican English establishment in name at least, Toland’s career sheds important light on the shaping of British identity at the very moment of its birth.
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Relgious Studies