Jonathan Swift was a High Church clergyman and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland. However, Gulliver displays no Christian devotion. His Christianity is simply assumed in a narrative which presupposes a largely Christian readership. The chapter considers Gulliver’s witness of religious practices in the countries he visits. Gulliver’s Travels is predominantly a secular book, but its philosophical, political, and historical perspectives are refracted through the lens of Swift’s religious confession. In these voyages to remote nations of the world, Gulliver encounters or discusses religio-political issues that were highly controversial back home in Gulliver’s England. The book draws upon religious history and polemic. The satire’s treatment of European religious controversy and its view of human nature attracted charges of blasphemy and irreligion, as had Swift’s earlier satiric masterpiece A Tale of a Tub.The chapter examines these charges and comments on some modern critical views of the religious implications of Gulliver’s Travels. It indicates some significant parallels between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Thomas More’s Utopians.

This chapter considers Swift’s scepticism of the written and printed word from the perspective of his fear of Dissenting Protestant scriptural exegesis and the putative transparency of print culture. Sola scriptura is the Protestant doctrine, embraced most by evangelical Christians like the Dissenters, that texts alone convey meaning without interpretation (what we call ‘textualism’ in legal interpretation and literary criticism). This essay examines his close personal and intellectual relationship with the Catholic poet Alexander Pope, who was also of the Church most sceptical of sola scriptura, and their joint attack with the rest of the Scriblerus Club against the Whig ideology of textualism and the cult of scientific empiricism (often referred to by critics as ‘naïve empiricism’). This chapter offers both a historical and contemporary perspective on literature and technology, examining Swift’s doubts concerning the printing press as the new information technology of the time and extending this vein of criticism to new digital humanities platforms for Swift’s texts.

Swift’s paratexts to his posthumous editions of the works of his patron, Sir William Temple, first presented his words in high-quality print. Having chosen Benjamin Tooke the younger as his bookseller, Swift went on to publish A Tale of a Tub in 1704 – a notorious and expensive production, which, considered as a book, turns out, despite its modern reputation, to be surprisingly normal.