The Invention of Politics and Religion in Seventeenth Century England

Forthcoming, January 2027)

This monograph originates within the critical study of ‘religion’ and related categories. It’s main focus is the provincial origins of, and discourse surrounding, the noun 'politics' and its relation to ideas of liberty, progress and religion during the seventeenth century.

The book seeks to de-normalize some of the apparently innocent categories that, since then, have constructed our world and organised our knowledge and our institutions. At the heart of the work is a close examination of a range of texts by seventeenth century authors and the disparities between the language they themselves use and the ideas attributed to them by modern historians.

Religion, politics, and history are all contested terms, and yet they are widely used as though their meanings are obvious. This illusion is projected by the modern secular university where these problematic ideas are institutionalised as distinct academic disciplines. The professionalised reproduction of these Anglocentric categories paradoxically renders them as a-historical and generates a misleading appearance of scientific objectivity and universality. However, even in English there are problems of translation. For instance, the seventeenth century is frequently described by historians as an age of political and scientific revolution. Yet there was no ‘politics’ or ‘science’ as distinct from ‘religion’, and the post-enlightenment idea of ‘revolution’ implies a concept of time, progress and history that does not fit that world. The historiographical (mis)representation of the past in terms of the present, while appearing as non-partisan objective description, has the unintended consequence of cognitively trapping us in a dysfunctional ‘modernity’.