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Article ID: CBB659234185

Caught in the Crossfire of Early Modern Controversy: Strabo on Moses and His Corrupt Successors (2018)

Henny, Sundar (Author)

Intellectual History Review
Volume: 28
Issue: 1
Pages: 35-59

URI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2018.1402440

DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2018.1402440

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Geography Science and religion Early modern Grotius, Hugo Du Plessis de Mornay, Philippe Casaubon, Isaac Toland, John Strabo

The Greek geographer Strabo described Moses as a charismatic leader who had instilled in his followers a simple form of worship and an unconventional form of government. Subsequent generations of Moses’s successors had exploited people’s awe of the sacred, however, in order to erect a superstitious and tyrannical hierocracy. John Toland’s Origines Judaicae (1709) relied heavily on Strabo’s testimony in its denunciation of superstition and priestcraft. Strabo’s passage on Moses was well known, not only to Toland but to Christian apologists who – since the sixteenth century – had used it to defend the account of Moses in the Old Testament. Yet, by the eighteenth century, Strabo had been transformed from a quasi-Christian authority into a historical liability to orthodoxy. Attending to the often-neglected reception of Strabo, this article uncovers continuities and discontinuities in ideas of superstition and priestcraft through the writings of Isaac Casaubon, Philippe de Mornay, Hugo Grotius, and John Toland. It argues that the reception of Strabo in the early modern period demonstrates how his Geography became increasingly caught in the crossfire of religious controversy.

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Article James A. T. Lancaster; Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (2018) Priestcraft. Early Modern Variations on the Theme of sacerdotal imposture. Intellectual History Review (pp. 1-6). unapi

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