Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet: Biblical Criticism and the Crisis of Late Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

During the last years of the seventeenth century, many English virtuosi became embroiled in a complex dispute which concerned the nature of the evidence and of the authorities appropriate for their studies. This was not simply an academic quarrel, since matters of faith were closely linked with matters of scholarship, perhaps especially at a time when a fresh group of schismatics, the non-jurors who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to William III in 1689, were attempting to establish their claims to be the true representatives of orthodoxy through the products of their learning. Nor was it to be a quiet, academic affair, conducted in private. Instead it was carried on in part through the pages of books, and of a periodical press whose boldness and productivity were no longer encumbered by the need to satisfy the licenser. This dispute is traditionally known as “the Battle of the Books,” but the literary dimension into which this term tends to cast discussions of the quarrel leads to neglect of its political, philosophical, historical and theological content and importance.2