In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? It is now known that religious works formed the greater part of the publishing market for most of the century. What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people's hands? Vanity Fair and the Celestial City is the first book to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by evangelical dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. Isabel Rivers also looks back to earlier sources and forward to the continued republication of many of these works well into the nineteenth century. The first part is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and not-for-profit religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. The second part shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. The third part explores the main literary kinds, including annotated bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. Building on many years' research into the religious literature of the period, Rivers discusses over two hundred writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. The Age of Enlightenment profoundly enriched religious and philosophical understanding and continues to influence present-day thinking. Works collected here include masterpieces by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as religious sermons and moral debates on the issues of the day, such as the slave trade. The Age of Reason saw conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism transformed into one between faith and logic -- a debate that continues in the twenty-first century. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T116850 Omicron = John Newton. Half-title: 'Omicron's letters'. London: printed by T. Wilkins. For J. Buckland; and J. Johnson, 1785. vi,342p.; 12°

This major new publication is the most comprehensive reference source ever on eighteenth-century authors writing in the English language about philosophical ideas and issues. Featuring authors taken from 1689 through to the middle of the nineteenth century, the period beginning with John Locke and ending with Dugald Stewart, the word 'philosophical' is used in a wide, eighteenth-century sense. Thus the Dictionary includes epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, education, politics, rhetoric, science, medicine, biology, geology, chemistry and theology, and many of the authors may more usually be called divines, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, or even poets. In addition to short biographies of the writers, there are detailed expositions and analyses of their doctrines and ideas, bibliographies of their writings and suggestions for further reading. There are also mini-entries on extremely obscure figures and appendices listing anonymous tracts. All the major eighteenth-century philosophers are featured, but the most valuable feature of the Dictionary is its representation of a huge range of less well-known writers. In many cases the Dictionary offers the first scholarly treatment of the life and work of certain writers. This book will be an indispensable reference work for scholars working on almost any aspect of eighteenth-century studies.