This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early modern history of religion as stale, pedantic, and blandly ‘orthodox’ until it was swept aside by a critical and heterodox ‘enlightenment’ is being revised, first in new approaches to early modern histories of biblical Judaism and historicizations of the Old Testament, second in new readings of early modern scholarship on primitive Christianity. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of research which divorce narratives of intellectual change from the linear and inconclusive emphasis on ‘enlightenment’, favouring an approach that conversely emphasizes the impact of confessionalization in creating a newly critical scholarly culture.

This article examines an important new manuscript discovery: a set of lectures delivered at the Society of Apothecaries in 1634 by four members of the Society. No evidence of the intellectual and methodological assumptions of the apothecaries in this period has previously been known; the article contextualizes the lectures, and identifies the authors-a prominent group of apothecaries centered on the controversial John Buggs and the botanist Thomas Johnson. It then proceeds to discuss the contents of the lectures, which consist, to a remarkable extent, of reflections on the nature of physic and pharmacy inspired by the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical humanists. The apothecaries used the resources of medical humanism to raise the status of pharmacy as a medical discipline, and to argue for the proficiency of the apothecary as a fully fledged physician. Moreover, they emphasized the role of operative arts and used the rhetoric of "experiment" and "experience" in ways that might seem, on first impression, to foreshadow the "new science" that would soon emerge in England. As such, the lectures allow us to make not only some major revisions to existing accounts of the apothecary-physician relationship and the intellectual assumptions behind it, but also to some prominent recent literature in the social history of science and the history of the concept of "experimental philosophy."

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