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This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds and, in these contexts, analyze freethinkers' organizations, projects, networks, and contributions to forming a secular worldview, in particular, the promotion of concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this secularist agenda, the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties freethinkers were faced with, namely, the tensions between a national self-image and the transnational direction the movement has taken; the regional base of many projects and their transregional horizon; freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission; and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups. Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global developments.

Book Excerpt: ...es (Baltimore, 1871) and Antiquity of Christianity (New York, 1874).Albini (Giuseppe). Italian physiologist, b. Milan. In 1845 he studied medicine in Paris. He has written on embryology and many other physiological subjects.Alchindus. Yakub ibn Is'hak ibn Subbah (Abú Yúsuf) called Al Kindi, Arab physician and philosopher, the great grandson of one of the companions of Muhammad, the prophet, flourished from 814 to about 840. He was a rationalist in religion, and for his scientific studies he was set down as a magician.Alciati (Giovanni Paolo). A Milanese of noble family. At first a Romanist, he resigned that faith for Calvinism, but gradually advanced to Anti-trinitarianism, which he defends in two letters to Gregorio Pauli, dated Austerlitz 1564 and 1565. Beza says that Alciati deserted the Christian faith and became a Muhammadan, but Bayle takes pains to disprove this. Died at Dantzic about 1570.Aleardi (Gaetano). Italian poet, known as Aleardo Aleardi, b. Verona...

A corrective to the much-discussed Victorian `crisis of faith', this study focuses upon several prominent individuals who experienced a `crisis of doubt' and made the reverse journey, abandoning secularism to defend Christianity. Their stories demonstrate the intellectual strength of faith in the nineteenth century.