Hudson reinterprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists' including: Charles Blount (1654-1693), John Toland (1670-1722), Anthony Collins (1679-1729), Matthew Tindal (1656-1733), Thomas Woolston (1669-1733), Thomas Morgan (nd-1743), Thomas Chubb (1679-1747) and Peter Annet (1693-1769), as well as the 'father of English deism', Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). Historians tend to assume that these figures accepted deism as a totalising outlook. Hudson, however, argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. Adopting a distinctive position with implications for contemporary debates about the Enlightenment, Hudson contextualizes these writers within the early Enlightenment, which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition.

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