It is now de rigueur to prick the Enlightenment's pretensions to ‘reason’ by demonstrating that the eighteenth-century was replete with mystics, millenarians and miracle workers. Alchemy, the Kabbalah and Behmenism stalk the new Enlightenment. Laborie's fine monograph pushes at an open door, yet brings into the room a rich exploration of the ‘French Prophets’. This was a group of refugees from the hideous brutalities of the Camisard revolt in the Languedoc who arrived in London in 1706, quickly gathered several hundred followers, and captured public imagination. A prosecution for blasphemy and a failed bodily resurrection later, the movement subsided, though a devoted core persisted and today find descendants among the American Shakers. Laborie is generous in his debts to the important study by Hillel Schwartz thirty-five years ago, but he takes the subject in fresh direction. Humbling in his archival tenacity (embracing Halle, Paris, Geneva, Chester, Glasgow), his new finds include notes on the backs of playing cards, cited thus: 4♠. Sure-footed in his presentation, he handles panoramas and vignettes assuredly, and glides between Cevennois topography and patristic theology. Resourceful in his methodological catholicity, he approaches the Prophets, and ‘enthusiasm’, via prosopography, lexicography, theology, psychology and pathology. Thus, one chapter explores ecstatic spirituality, from thaumaturgy through glossolalia to apokatastasis; another, the havering of governments about whether to prosecute; a third, the development of psychological understandings of melancholy. Laborie is anxious to puncture a peculiarly English historiographical tradition that seeks to find a plebeian ‘underground’, a ‘radical’ tradition of religious dissent, from the Lollards through the Ranters and onward. The Prophets were not dissenters, but Christian universalists who drew support from Anglicans and Dissenters alike. And they were not low born, but socially diverse, and included such respectable adherents as the wealthy Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Richard Bulkeley and the mathematician and friend of Newton and Locke, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. The Prophets caused a traffic jam of luxury coaches in Soho. They were a ‘contagious social disease’ exactly because they were fashionable: theirs was a sickness of modern, polite society. Connectedly, Laborie detaches ‘enthusiasm’ from its usual placement amid the fearful party political and anti-Dissenting reaction against Civil War fanaticism. Instead, he explores, not reactions tied to the politics of Civil War memory, but, rather, new registers of response to ecstatic religion. He explores Augustan stage satire against ‘imposture’ and credulity, and, among the physicians and natural philosophers, the gradual medicalisation of psychosomatic phenomena. Religious hysteria was handed from the heresiarch to the physician.
The book is absorbing, lucid, scholarly, and an essential read for students of both the Anglophone ‘Enlightenment’ and English religious history. In many ways it is a model monograph. I have some reservations. The evidential basis of the prosopographical analysis is not fully explained. As Laborie notes, a number of influential people turned up just to observe the mystics. It is not clear which of these, and why, end up in the appendix among the 665 identified followers. Bishop Edward Fowler is a critic in the text but appears in the appendix. Robert Harley considers prosecuting the Prophets in the text, but his devoted brother Edward appears in the appendix as a member. The Quaker savant Benjamin Furly is said to have become an ‘unconditional supporter’ and recent scholars are reproached for ignoring this; yet no substance is given to the allegation of membership. (Sadly, the appendix lacks pagination so that index entries to it are nugatory.) The book's overall interpretative strategy seems to slide somewhat unsteadily between positing the mystics as a phenomenon against Enlightenment (causing us to doubt the ubiquity of Enlightenment ‘rationalism’) and as a phenomenon which was in part constitutive of Enlightenment (causing us to doubt Enlightenment rationalism per se). The former position is merely a warning that most people remained Christian believers in the supernatural in the eighteenth century; while the latter is more epistemically ambitious in debunking the classical concept of Enlightenment. On some pages Fellows of the Royal Society and the College of Physicians queue up to embrace the Prophets; on other pages they fall over themselves to theorise religious insanity. We teeter between spiritual catharsis as a form of holistic medicine and religious madness as a case for phlebotomy. On one page the Prophets ‘challenged the laws of physics’; on another ‘Enlightenment and enthusiasm … went hand in hand’. Thus we are caught between parousia and sickness. Yet Laborie's methodological promiscuity is, in the end, and quite properly, appealing. We are left in an epistemically unstable domain in which, at one moment, we are asked to take ecstasy seriously as a form of intense spiritual encounter with the divine, deeply embedded in the Christian tradition; while at another the Prophets accelerate the emergence of a secular understanding of melancholia and hysteria.
