This chapter examines eighteenth-century moral debates about wealth, poverty and corruption in the emerging commercial state. In particular, it discusses four important moments in these debates: Bernard Mandeville’s celebration of avarice and vice, the fustigations of writers like Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon about the corruption they attributed to financial and commercial innovations, Adam Ferguson’s worries about the corruptions of commercial modernity, and, finally, Adam Smith’s indignation at the spirit of monopoly that threatened to undermine the moral and material gains of commercial society.

This chapter offers an overview of key points of entry for the study of eighteenth-century science. The first section addresses how seventeenth-century philosophers challenged Aristotelianism and ancient cosmologies. The second details the importance of empiricism in the new study of the natural world. The third focuses on the roles of specific instruments and institutions in natural philosophical inquiry. Sections four and five cover two of the fiercest philosophical debates of the period: first, about gravity and action at a distance, and second, about theories of matter and spirit. The final section examines encyclopaedism and the emergence toward the end of the century of three new sub-disciplines: chemistry, botany, and geology. A distinguishing feature of eighteenth-century science is how closely it was interwoven with theology. Theories about providence and intelligent design were central to nearly every scientific debate because it was assumed that studying the causes of natural phenomena was the best way to understand the Prime Mover’s intentions for humankind. Accordingly, a recurrent theme in this chapter is the interconnection of religion and science.

The debate over the presence and nature of a single established church in England is perhaps the most important religious issue in the long eighteenth century. From the Elizabethan ‘Penal Laws’ designed to suppress Roman Catholicism to the ‘Clarendon Code’, intended to limit the civil participation of Protestant Nonconformists, the history of religious establishment in England reveals patterns of protectionism and exclusion necessary to maintain the privileged position of the Church ‘as by law established’. New ideas in the eighteenth century, such as toleration and deism, as well as the rise of Methodism, challenged but did not overcome this Anglican hegemony.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.

This chapter focuses on Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Among thecritical issues tdiscussed are the literary relationship between Ephesians and Colossians, the significance of the haustafeln in their various forms, and early Christian attitudes toward slavery.

This chapter focuses on Second Temple Judaism, Greco-Roman religions, and the philosophical schools of the time, with special attention to the ways in which they influence the New Testament.

This chapter discusses critical issues involved in the interpretation of the Corinthian correspondence, with special attention to various responses to Paul and his claims to apostolic authority, to different understandings of the resurrection in the early church, and to the collection for the saints in Jerusalem and its significance for interpreting Paul’s larger ministry.

This chapter discusses James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, and Jude, as well as the origins and implications of the nomenclature for these writings. Among the critical issues to be discussed are Johannine sectarianism andthe literary relationship between Jude and 2 Peter.

This chapter introduces introduce the critical issues in the study of Paul and his letters, including the problems to be solved in historical reconstructions of his ministry, the standard approaches to determining the authorship of the letters, his place within the Judaism of his time, and the so-called “New Perspective” on Paul.

This chapter discusses a range of approaches to the New Testament that have emerged in recent decades, often in explicit reaction to historical-critical methods, under the rubric of social history and ideology.

In addition to treating the critical issues that arise in the interpretation of Matthew, for example, the birth narrative and the Sermon on the Mount, the significance of the “formula quotations,” the implications of considering it to be a “Jewish gospel," the Synoptic Problem, and Q.

This chapter focuses on various text-centered approaches that emerge from the field of literary criticism in the twentieth century (e.g., narrative criticism, reader-response theory) and their application to the New Testament.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the “quest for the historical Jesus” and survey current trends in research. These trends include shifting evaluations of (1) the criteria employed in determining the authenticity of sayings (e.g., dissimilarity) and other methodological issues, (2) recent discussion of “Q,” and (3) the relative value of noncanonical books.