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It is increasingly clear that histories of secularization are not simply dispassionate descriptions of the decline of religious belief and practice in the West. Rather, such narratives often seek to celebrate secularization, promote some version of it, lament it, or otherwise oppose it in favour of a programme of desecularization or resacralization. The aim of this book is to identify some of the major genres of the history of secularization and to explore their historical contexts, normative commitments, and tendential purposes.ã The contributors to the volume offer different perspectives on these questions, not least because a number of them are themselves participants in the cultural-political programs described above. The primary purpose of this book, however, is the identification of such programs rather than their promotion. Overall, the collection seeks to bring analytical clarity to ongoing debates about secularization and help explain the co-existence of apparently conflicting stories about the origins of Western modernity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Intellectual History Review journal

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 Worlds visible and invisible -- The wisdom of the world -- The three senses -- Words and things -- 2 Sensible signs and spoken words -- The ascendency of the physical -- The discovery of nature -- Reading nature: the whole and the parts -- Restoring lost likenesses -- 3 The two reformations -- Aristotle and the encyclopaedias -- Texts and the empirical world -- New worlds -- Corrupt texts and reformed religion -- The literal sense and the material world -- 4 Re-reading the two books -- Genesis and history -- Modifications of the literal: typology and accommodation -- The cosmology of Moses -- The science of the last things -- 5 The purpose of nature -- The ends of the creation -- Divine designs and human utilities -- The centre of the universe -- The natural world and the moral order -- God and the book of nature -- 6 Eden restored -- Paradise within -- The fall -- The deluge and confusion of tongues -- Reversing the curse -- Replanting the garden -- Learning the language of nature -- Conclusion -- References -- Index

A collection of original essays offering a comprehensive history of the emergence of scientific naturalism. Beginning with the naturalists of ancient Greece, and proceeding through the middle ages, the scientific revolution, and into the nineteenth century, the contributors examine past ideas about 'nature' and 'the supernatural'. Ranging over different scientific disciplines and historical periods, they show how past thinkers often relied upon theological ideas andpresuppositions in their systematic investigations of the world. In addition to providing material that contributes to a history of 'nature' and naturalism, this collection challenges a number of widely held misconceptions about the history of scientific naturalism.