Abstract The history of early modern scholarship was long written as a subject set at some remove from the rest of early modern society. Learning was the common property of like-minded scholars in the ‘Republic of Letters’, linked by shared codes of elite sociability and united by a mutual concern to transcend religious boundaries. Recent years have seen such views challenged, with studies demonstrating how much scholarly activity was undertaken to achieve confessional objectives. Yet, these contributions have chiefly focused on orthodox clerical scholars. This article uses the case of John Locke to present a new perspective on the place and significance of erudition in the early modern period. It is based on a thoroughgoing examination of Locke’s lifetime of religious reading, bringing together evidence from his manuscript notebooks and journals, his library catalogues and annotated books, and his correspondence and published works. It coins the notion of ‘everyday erudition’ to reveal how learning was not an abstruse concern. Instead, for Locke and his contemporaries at multiple points on the socio-cultural scale, it was a kind of common currency, a tool to be used to come to terms with the historical reality of Christian revelation.
Timothy Twining (Thu,) studied this question.