Although not a biography, the focal point of William Bulman’s study of Anglicanism in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries is the Church of England clergyman Lancelot Addison (d.1703), a chaplain and controversialist. Bulman's text follows Addison through his life from school and university to unusually wide and exotic locations for a seventeenth-century cleric, including Tangiers. Addison wrote prolifically on the people, religions, and customs he encountered throughout his life and travels and produced works such as First state of Mahumedism and The present state of the Jews, both drawing on first-hand contact with Muslims and Jews in colonial territories. As a chaplain he travelled, but, as a writer, he was also part of the figurative ‘Republic of Letters.'
Bulman’s starting point is Addison's tract Modest plea for the clergy, a work of enduring importance that resurfaced in eighteenth-century religious controversies. But the study also ranges widely in place and topic. The “orientalism” referred to in the title is in fact only one aspect of both Addison's scholarly interests and Bulman's study. Intellectual inquiry concerning divine and civil religion, the catechizing of youth, so-called ‘Priestcraft,’ preaching, and worship occupy the latter section of the text, after Tangiers and orientalism have been left behind.
A framing question of Bulman’s study is not only was there an Enlightenment, but was there an Anglican Enlightenment. Bulman acknowledges that the link between Anglican and Enlightenment creates (and, in his experience, has created) scholarly resistance. He also notes that scholars often view the Church of England in the post-Restoration era as coercive and therefore antithetical to the Enlightenment. But in the careers of people such as Addison, and in particular their contribution to the field of Orientalist studies, he urges that the “early orientalists' ” interest in Judaism, Islam, and the Islamic empires helped transform the disciplines of late Renaissance scholarship into the human sciences of the Enlightenment (47). He also notes the longer contribution of Anglican divines to orientalist studies, including William Laud, and of clergy as collectors of rare manuscripts in exotic languages (58).
Addison’s intellectual and geographic journeys present the reader with unusual historical impressions, such as a seventeenth-century clergyman eating garlic, napping on the floor, and consorting with Jews and Muslims (83). At a deeper intellectual level, Addison contributed to scholarly networks and intelligence gathering as well. Bulman suggests the links between intelligence and scholarly networks and he locates Addison and other divines at a point in history where their work “epitomized the mature contribution of late humanist culture to early modern statecraft” (53).
Bulman considers that not only Addison’s published works, but the scholarly methodologies underpinning them, represent significant intellectual developments, not least Addison's combination of research from older textual sources with his eyewitness observations and what he learnt from interviewing people (82). Addison's scholarship shows his insistence on writing with insights from the present as well as antiquarian sources (96). This mixture of the current and the old, and Addison's contribution to the antiquarian orientalist impulses at Oxford, leads Bulman to his core argument that what has “gone largely unappreciated in the annals of historical truth . . . is that the new approaches to textual and material evidence made famous by the critics of the eighteenth century were often preceded, inspired, and complemented by the work of travelling historians in the seventeenth” (104).
Addison does clearly take his place within the ‘Republic of Letters' and Bulman makes a strong case for the importance, and in some cases novelty, of Addison’s methods of inquiry and scholarship, and their significance as intellectual milestones in using different types of source materials. But as Bulman himself points out, seventeenth-century writers, by no means all of them Anglicans, have long been acknowledged as foundational to Enlightenment thought, including Descartes (104). Elsewhere he locates Hobbesian influences in Addison's writing (139). Neither has the ‘Republic of Letters' lacked champions or interpreters. Given the depth of treatment in most of the book, some points are also left hanging. Bulman suggests that A modest plea, based as it was on this Hobbesian foundation, was “a conjectural history, something scholars usually associate with the following century” (139). If so, some further delineation of how the work prefigures or anticipates the next century is called for, but not forthcoming.
In the latter part of the book, Addison is back in England and at the heart of religious controversy. As the dean of a cathedral in conflict with his bishop, Addison appears in the midst of familiar controversies between “latitudinarians” and other parties within the Church of England. Here are well-measured points offering scholarly readjustment to a well-covered field. Addison's contributions to contemporary controversies over both catechisms and sermons shows, as Bulman argues, that fault lines between different parties can be overdrawn. Addison the high churchman made recommendations about preaching that scholars have often associated with the latitudinarians. Bulman does also show a satisfying full circle with Addison's time overseas and his research into other religions, which came to the fore when Addison, by the 1670s, was defending rites and worship based on their Jewish origins (179). Addison defended the Church, drawing on a wide scholarly landscape. Bulman's text overall knits together a complex series of travels, texts, and intellectual relationships where, for example, Addison's work, The first state of Mahumedism, contributed to the Exclusion Crisis as a book ostensibly about a foreign religion contained clear allusions to the current politics of religion in Restoration England. Whether or not there is acceptance of an “Anglican Enlightenment” will depend on a reader's willingness to take on board Bulman's points about the novelty and importance of Anglican divines' intellectual methods and outputs and to consider those against the disciplinary weight of the Restoration Church of England. But Bulman effectively charts the intellectual and geographic movements of scholars and reconstructs the often potent impact, intellectual and political, of their labors.
