The Vicar of Wakefield is a tale with marriage at its core. This chapter puts that preoccupation in historical and cultural context, accounting for the importance of the Whistonian controversy and Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 as backdrops to a novel which does not merely reflect its time, but anticipates subsequent treatments of the institution of marriage in fiction.

This chapter delves into early modern theories about a key scriptural story, that of Noah’s flood, and the theological implications of explaining the flood in a largely naturalistic manner through appeal to laws of nature. Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes used laws of nature as the basis for a naturalistic account of the creation of the world, and others followed suit. This chapter analyses two accounts of the world’s creation and subsequent dissolution in the flood written in England in the closing decades of the seventeenth century that drew on laws of nature: Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, and William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth. Burnet and Whiston each explore how those early events in the earth’s history might be accounted for through natural processes, making their treatises among the earliest explicit attempts in England to explain key scriptural events chiefly in terms of natural causality.

In this chapter, the Antichrist and the book of Revelation are placed within the context of modernity, beginning with the attempts of the new science to square it with the book of Revelation. It deals with the beginnings of scepticism about the Antichrist and prophetic history among the London wits, and the beginnings of the separation between prophecy and history. That said, the chapter argues that the Antichrist was to remain on the Protestant agenda well into the nineteenth century. It also demonstrates how, with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, the focus of theorising shifted from a papal to an imperial Antichrist. It also shows the transition from papal Antichrist to Adsonian Antichrist in the writings of John Henry Newman as he transitioned from Anglicanism to Catholicism. The chapter then argues that, with the rise of the historical critical approach to the Bible in the middle of the nineteenth century, prophetic history declined and the Antichrist became a free-floating signifier, available for use in many different contexts, both sacred and secular. Ironically, this enabled a proliferation of individual and collective Antichrist figures.