Abigail Hayton

Abigail Hayton is an intellectual historian of early modern Europe with particular interests in the history of biblical scholarship and the Christian reception of Jewish texts. Her thesis and first book project reveals the vast reception of the writings of Moses Maimonides in seventeenth-century England. Her post-doctoral project is a Europe-wide survey of Christian apologetical engagement with Jewish scholarship. Her work is principally concerned with the role played by post-biblical Jewish texts in the development of Christian theology in the early modern period.

Abstract: This project makes the case for the role played by Jewish scholarship in combatting the so-called Socinian heresy in the late seventeenth-century. In doing so it offers a novel perspective on the relationship between the Reformation and early Enlightenment. This heresy named for the uncle-nephew duo, Leilo (1525-1562) and Fausto Socinus (1539-1604), rejected that most fundamental of Christian doctrines, the Trinity. It was the apparent spread of this heresy to England, which was discernible in John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), which prompted the major political controversy of the 1690s. Whilst the Socinian heresy has been credited with advancing the cause of secularisation in early Enlightenment Europe, my research will demonstrate that it was, in fact, a great spur to sophisticated orthodox scholarship. Such scholarly endeavour was rooted in the tremendous advances in Jewish literacy among Christians to which the trilingual curriculum of the Renaissance university had given rise.