Genevieve Lloyd has edited a comprehensive collection of learned critical discussions of Spinoza's philosophy, covering the intellectual context in which he worked and the influence of his thought, as well as the published works.

The political writings

Zen Buddhists have long given the following advice to attain liberation: “Eat when you’re hungry. Sleep when you’re tired.” In other words: “Freedom” is the “knowledge of necessity” (Hegel, Marx, and Engels). Early Islamic communities dealt with the challenge of internal warfare and tyranny and concluded that, “sixty years of tyranny is better than one day’s anarchy.” In other words, the worst-case scenario is a war “of every man against every man,” (Thomas Hobbes) and all theories of statecraft are built upon that premise. Ever since the dawn of colonialism, indigenous peoples have been struggling for self-determination. Many, such as Comanche thinker Parra-Wa-Samen, lived and died for the right to move across a land without state or borders. In other words, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” (Patrick Henry).
How is it then that an English textbook could possibly focus on “freedom” as a universal value and simultaneously exclude all non-European traditions and perspectives? Why should conversations about “freedom” begin with Hegel, Hobbes, and Henry rather than the earlier examples of Zen, Islam, and indigenous peoples? If “freedom” concerns everybody then do not the conversations in academia about “freedom” by scholars (as well as rising economists, planners, and politicians) affect everybody? If democratic inclusivity entails the demand that all people affected by decisions are to be included in those very decision-making processes then contemporary academia has a problem when talking about “freedom.” In selling the term “freedom” as a universally applicable but uniquely European (and sacrosanct) idea most of the planet has been excluded from these conversations. This means that control over the idea and how it is interpreted has been determined by a very narrow range of persons, from the mid-1600s to mid-1900s: almost exclusively white, male, heterosexual, property-owning, able-bodied, and, not uncommonly, racist. 
This thesis argues that the problem goes deeper than white supremacy and patriarchy and cannot be resolved with quota systems to ensure inclusion on the basis of race or gender. Instead, the problem is two-fold: (1) dominant conceptions of “freedom,” as the opposite of “slavery,” “tyranny,” or “constraint,” are seen here as bound to a mentality and language of domination, and (2) “freedom,” as a central value in social orders, perpetuates white supremacy and patriarchy. Focus on “freedom” contra “unfreedom” obscures, disguises, or denies those “unfreedoms” upon which “freedom” is necessarily bound. Once those “unfreedoms” are exposed or recognized (whether violence, obligation, responsibility, dependency and interdependency, equality and inequality, needs, justice, limitations, etc.) the conversations about “freedom” can be spoken in a language that all cultures can understand in order to participate as equal parties. 
Toward these ends, this dissertation engages in stories from three contemporary empirical contexts in the U.S.: the Unitarian Universalist Association, the MOVE Organization, and taqwacore. Through a blend of text analysis, ethnography, storytelling, and personal experience, the purpose of this thesis is to imagine what more inclusive conversations might look like. Using the term (un)freedom to transcend the false binary of “freedom” and “unfreedom,” three potential types of (un)freedom are conceived to further the aim of democratic inclusivity: Negotiating the Limits of Language, Shouldering Incalculable Responsibility in Community, and Feeling an Obligation to Challenge Injustice.

Universal Burdens : Stories of (Un)Freedom from the Unitarian Universalist Association, The MOVE Organization, and Taqwacore

The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination

This thesis addresses attitudes towards mystical theology in seventeenth-century England. While current historiography on mystical theology tends to stress its Catholic and medieval contexts, it has so far overlooked the ways in which Protestants continued to assimilate it in the early modern period. By exploring how Catholics and Protestants engaged with each other when discussing mystical theology, this thesis traces both irenic and intolerant responses to the debate. In many cases the confessional stance of the author of mystical works was seen as secondary to the spiritual benefits derived from them.

Drawing on substantial archival material as well as printed works, this thesis shows that both Catholics and Protestants claimed mystical theology as their own through references to ‘mysticks’ and ‘mystical theology’. Tracing such references generates new insights into the role mystical theology played in the religious beliefs of a diverse range of groups including the English Benedictines, Familists, antinomians, Cambridge Platonists and Philadelphians. By exploring the beliefs of these diverse groups through a semantic approach we can use mystical theology to understand religious debates across the seventeenth century more broadly. As the mystical ‘way of knowing’ became associated with both Catholic and radical ‘enthusiasm’ by those seeking to discredit it, it is argued that the Philadelphian Society failed to survive largely due to their attempts to assimilate both Catholic and radical uses of mystical theology into their beliefs.

This thesis rejects attempts to define or label a form of ‘mysticism’ in the period as subjective, preferring instead to understand exactly what ‘mystical theology’ and ‘mysticks’ meant to contemporaries. By showing that the identification of authors as ‘mysticks’ for the first time in the English language had its origins in the seventeenth century within diverse contexts, it also questions the usefulness of some twenty-first century labels.

Holy and Peculiar People: Mysticks and Mystical Theology in England, 1605-1705

Introduction 1. The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity 2. Socinianism in England and Europe 3. The Great Tew Circle: Socinianism and scholarship 4. Royalists, Socinianism and the English Civil War 5. Socinianism and the Church of England 6. Reason, religion and the doctrine of the Trinity 7. Anti-trinitarianism, Socinianism and the limits of toleration 8. Socinianism and the Cromwellian Church settlement Conclusion: the legacy of Socinianism.

Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism

Heterodoxy was a rich and diverse phenomenon in early modern Europe, and is a subject of growing interest to intellectual historians. It has been explored from different angles in several recent collections, with fruitful results. This chapter do this in a variety of specific ways, across the fields of political thought, moral and natural philosophy, and the writing of history. It set the problem of heterodoxy's intellectual consequences in a broader framework and have sought successively to indicate the purpose of this volume, to establish the place of 'heterodoxy' in the religious culture of early modern Europe, and, at greatest length, to set out what seem to us to have been the principal structural features of heterodox religious thought, along with some of their possible consequences. The chapter follows by Hans Blom and Sarah Mortimer offer markedly different interpretations of Grotius's treatment of natural law and its relation to revelation. Keywords:early modern europe; Grotius's; Hans Blom; heterodoxy; intellectual consequences; Sarah Mortimer

Nature, Revelation, History: The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750

During the 1640s, English divines came to place new weight on the role of the Apostles in founding the Christian Church. Earlier in the century, Archbishop Laud and his allies had tended to appeal to the Old Testament, and especially to the Jerusalem of King David, as a model for the English church. In Jerusalem, they argued, king and church had cooperated in perfect harmony, and they sought to emulate this situation. With the outbreak of civil war, however, Jerusalem no longer seemed such an appropriate model. Clerics and laymen alike had to think afresh about the relationship between church and state, and several episcopalian clergymen began to appeal instead to the church of the Apostles, seeing this as a template for a church which was independent of the state. This essay examines the concept of apostolicity as understood between 1620 and 1650, showing that it proved both fruitful and problematic for English theologians.

Kingship and the ‘Apostolic Church,’ 1620-1650

Religion and Enlightenment

I.Few issues were more hotly contested by early modern theologians than the extent of human liberty and its implications for both religion and society. In the Protestant world, the sixteenth century saw increasingly strident statements of mankind's bondage to sin and the importance of God's eternal decree of predestination, but the concept of human moral responsibility still had its defenders. One influential proponent of human liberty was Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), the Italian scholar known most commonly today for his denial of the trinity. Yet the central theme of his theology was his insistence that Christian virtues must be carried out voluntarily; it was from this principle that his more heterodox ideas flowed. He made a sharp distinction between natural and voluntary action, and argued that the practice of Christianity must be an act of human will, not one to which men were drawn by nature. Separating Christianity from the natural order, Socinus argued that eternal life awaited those who chose to follow the law of Christ rather than the natural law. His argument challenged the Protestant commitment to the unity of natural and divine law and it opened up conceptual space for voluntary action outside the natural law. In this article, I shall sketch the Socinian position on human liberty and Christianity, and suggest how and why the Italian's ideas were developed by Protestants in the early seventeenth century. His readers included the eminent Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), and the exchange between Grotius and the Socinians reveals the concern on both sides to explain the relationship between human liberty, Christianity, and natural law.Socinus' life, like his theology, began within the reform movement in Italy and ended among the marginalised anti-trinitarians in Poland. Born of a long line of Italian jurists, he shared both his family's legal interests and their critical approach to the Catholic Church. In his youth he had been a courtier in Florence but his increasingly critical attitude towards Catholicism - and the death of his patron Grand-Duke Cosimo I - resulted in his departure from Italy in 1574. After a period in Basel he found a home among the Polish Anabaptists at Rakow, a young and precarious community which he helped to sustain through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf.1 During these years, he was also able to develop his own interpretation of Christianity, and to explain it in numerous works issuing from the community's press. Although his ideas generated a lively debate from the start, both in Poland and Germany, it was only after his death that they began to be absorbed into the mainstream of European intellectual discussions. Socinus' theological ideas had their attractions for some Protestant readers, but they became entangled with more political questions and their implications for civil life began to cause serious alarm. For this reason my focus will be upon the responses of Dutch and German readers, particularly Hugo Grotius and Johan Crell (15901633), both of whom addressed the civil as well as the theological aspects of Socinus' legacy. First, however, I shall draw out the salient points from Socinus' rich and complex theology, paying particular attention to his understanding of human liberty. Unlike his orthodox Protestant contemporaries, Socinus believed that liberty was the precondition for virtue.Socinus shared with the broader Christian humanist tradition the belief that Christ demanded works as well as faith from his followers. Christians must follow the pattern of ethical living laid down by their master; like Erasmus before him, and like the Italian exiles he met in Basel, Socinus saw Christianity as a religion of action.2 For this reason, he was determined to protect the liberty and capacity of each individual to act virtuously, and therefore to defend what he understood as human free will. It was, he felt, a pressing task, for these qualities were being undermined by his contemporaries and particularly by those on the Protestant side. …

Sarah Mortimer

Papers

Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism

Nature, Revelation, History: The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750

Kingship and the ‘Apostolic Church,’ 1620-1650

Religion and Enlightenment

Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers