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  • Chapter 6 - An Atheist Text by Archibald Pitcairne

  • Michael Hunter, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book:
    Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment
    Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023, pp 123-143

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 provides the background to Archibald Pitcairne’s overtly atheist treatise, Pitcairneana, which is published in full in Chapter 7. It surveys Pitcairne’s career, including his meeting with Isaac Newton in 1692, his medical practice and influence, his passionate Episcopalianism and Jacobitism and his hostility to Presbyterianism, his circle of friends, his library and reading, and his Latin versification. Particular attention is given to his religious views, including the heterodox tract that he circulated in print, Epistola Archimedis, which voiced a deeply subversive view of Christian doctrine, and to Pitcairneana, of which the history of the manuscript and its content is given careful scrutiny.