How did New England Puritans reconcile their faith with the emergence of scientific empiricism? As Sarah Rivett, a literary scholar at Princeton, tells it, they did so with relative ease. Rivett argues that both Puritans and practitioners of the new science grappled with the limitations of humankind’s perceptive faculties. By the middle of the 17th century, the “study of the soul and the study of the world” had emerged as “parallel empirical techniques.” Animated by the essential optimism of John Calvin’s Institutes, Puritan studies of the soul and scientific studies of the world eagerly sought answers for seemingly unknowable questions. Like Charles Webster, a towering figure in the history of science and medicine, Rivett clarifies the often-murky relationship between religion and science in the early modern world. Unlike Webster, Rivett closely considers the place of women and native peoples in that history, as well as the nature of the evidence that “soul” scientists examined.

In The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement, Ulrich Lehner challenges the longstanding academic assumption that the Enlightenment and Catholicism are fundamentally incompatible. Citing the Council of Trent’s emphasis on a theology of human freedom, Lehner posits that the men he calls “Catholic Enlighteners” were “moderates, favoring a modernization that compromised with tradition and reigning authorities.” These 18th-century Enlighteners had two aims: to use scientific and philosophic achievements to defend Catholicism in a new language, and to reconcile their faith with modern culture. Although Lehner recognizes local variations in the particulars of Enlightened Catholic belief, he suggests that they generally shared a scholastic tradition that disdained religious enthusiasm, and had little room for superstition or prejudice.

Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England is a standard in early modern European history. This wide-ranging study examines both the tensions and the congruences between the established church’s teachings and popular belief.