Blurb:

What might be called ‘the early modern study of religion,’ grounded an attempt to create a coherent scientific field from ‘religious studies’ in Great Britain and Holland. It was not an entirely autonomous academic discipline, nor was it a fully scientific enterprise. Nevertheless, as one historian of the period put it, it gave that academic enterprise “an impulse, a shape, a terminology and a set of ideals” that made a genuinely scientific study of religion possible in the twentieth century.