Focusing particularly on literary texts, but including biographical and intellectual background, this study examines numinous feeling as it is recorded by a number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers: Browne, Drydcn, Pascal; Pope and Swift; Hume and Johnson; eight other poets, including Watts, Smart, Cowper, and Blake; and four novelists, including Richardson, Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis. Professor Stock demonstrates that the Enlightenment was far more complicated than can be grasped by an exclusive focus on its rationalism and skepticism.

Originally published in 1982.

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