In an earlier book I explored the ideological foundations of the natural philosophy of Robert Boyle and his followers in the early Royal Society. In this book I complete the task begun there of uncovering and examining an alternative understanding of the relations between knowledge and society, science and power, that challenged the outlook and aims of the Royal Society during the Restoration. This alternative understanding, spawned during the mid-century crisis, survived well into the eighteenth century and continued to threaten that version of the scientific Enlightenment which upheld established Christianity, by offering its own radical version of enlightenment which did not. This study provides a way we did not have before of understanding the connection between the radical Protestantism of the Interregnum and the radical Whiggery of the early eighteenth century.

The central figure in this story is Henry Stubbe (1632–76). I do not claim that he was a major thinker, but he was certainly a very exceptional one, who until now has been both misunderstood and depreciated. His career, once revealed, lends new meaning to Restoration science and connects it more closely with the central issue of the period, the question of church settlement. At once vivid and elusive, Stubbe as eccentric thinker and actor has made the writing of this book a virtually undiluted pleasure – full of concealed turnings, drama and chiaroscuro. I hope some of this also manages to get through.