Religious conventions and science in the early Restoration: Reformation and ‘ Israel ’ in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667)

Sprat situated his analysis of the Royal Society within an emerging Anglican Royalist narrative of the longue dure´e of post-Reformation England. A closer examination of Sprat’s own religious views reveals that his principal interest in the History of the Royal Society, as in the closely related reply to Samuel de Sorbie`re, the Observations, was to appropriate the advantages and benefits of the Royal Society as support for a re-established, anti-Calvinist Church of England. Sprat connected the two through a reformulation of the powerful conventions of ‘Reformation’ and ‘ Israel ’, both of which still resonated strongly in the religious politics of the 1660s. Applying his voluntarist theology, Sprat changed especially the representation of the chosen nation from a tale of divine castigation and punishment to a rational and probabilistic covenant based on material success as the indicator of God’s pleasure. Sprat proposed that the knowledge and application of nature, through the experimental labours of the Royal Society, could build an increasingly wealthy nation and so a permanent home for the reconfigured Israel. Attaching this to a renewed monarchical and Anglican state also meant security for the traditional forms of rule.