Article ID: CBB987543811

Protestantism and Liberty: Catharine Macaulay’s Politics of Religion as a Response to David Hume (2020)

unapi

Catharine Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James I (1763–1783) was intended by its author and received by its audience as, in part, a response to David Hume’s History of England. Macaulay’s writing has been read as a Whig counter to Hume’s Tory interpretation of England’s seventeenth-century history; more recent work has explored whether Macaulay or Hume has a better claim to be considered an “enlightenment historian”. This article will suggest that Macaulay’s views on the role of England’s Protestant belief and practice in the development and maintenance of the nation’s liberties contained, in the earlier volumes of her History, some of her substantive and important refutations of Hume’s arguments, and, further, that Macaulay’s well-argued claim that Protestantism was instrumental in the formation of England’s national character and potential enjoyment of political liberties was received by her readers as a particularly valuable part of her historical argument. Her accounts of Roman Catholic violence against Protestant victims at the Siege of La Rochelle and in the Irish Massacre of 1641 became some of the most quoted parts of her historical writing.

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Authors & Contributors
Sylla, Richard Eugene
Cheney, Lynne
James Livesey
Heather H. Vacek
O'Brien, Dan
Clossey, Luke
Concepts
Protestantism
Science and religion
History as a discipline; chronology; study of the past
Politics and government
Religion
Philosophy
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
Medieval
Enlightenment
20th century
Places
United States
France
Languedoc
Moravia
England
Greenland
Institutions
United States. Department of the Treasury
Theosophical Society
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