Blasphemy Archives - The Freethinker https://freethinker.co.uk/product-category/books/blasphemy/ The magazine of freethought, open enquiry and irreverence Sat, 01 Oct 2022 14:47:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 https://freethinker.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/cropped-The_Freethinker_head-512x512-1-32x32.png Blasphemy Archives - The Freethinker https://freethinker.co.uk/product-category/books/blasphemy/ 32 32 1515109 Acts Against God: A Short History of Blasphemy https://freethinker.co.uk/product/acts-against-god-a-short-history-of-blasphemy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=acts-against-god-a-short-history-of-blasphemy Sat, 01 Oct 2022 14:45:40 +0000 https://freethinker.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=6711 by David Nash.

Published by Reaktion Books, 2020.
Available in hardback or for Kindle.

David Nash is Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University. He has been researching, lecturing and publishing on the history of blasphemy for thirty years, and is author of Blasphemy in Britain (1999) and Blasphemy in the Christian World (2010). He also wrote "Britain's Blasphemy Heritage" for the Freethinker, published 1 October 2022.

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]]> “A phenomenon that spans human experience, from the ancient world right up to today’s ferocious religious debates, blasphemy is an act of individuals, but also a widespread and constant presence in cultural, political and religious life. Acts Against God is the first accessible history of this crime – its prosecution, its impact and its punishment and suppression. The book begins in ancient Greece with the genesis of blasphemy’s link with the state. From here we move on to blasphemy in the medieval world, in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The book concludes with the twenty-first century, with individuals and the state seeking to adopt blasphemy as the means to resist the secular and the globalization of culture.” [Amazon blurb]

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]]> 6711 Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth Century England https://freethinker.co.uk/product/word-crimes-blasphemy-culture-and-literature-in-nineteenth-century-england/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=word-crimes-blasphemy-culture-and-literature-in-nineteenth-century-england Tue, 27 Sep 2022 20:45:42 +0000 https://freethinker.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=6600 by Joss March.

First published by University of Chicago Press, 1998.

A history of blasphemy in Victorian England, with particular focus on the case of G.W. Foote, founder of The Freethinker.

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]]> “In 1883 the editor of a penny newspaper stood trial three times for the “obsolete” crime of blasphemy. The editor was G. W. Foote, the paper was the Freethinker, and the trial was the defining event of the decade. Foote’s “martyrdom” completed blasphemy’s nineteenth-century transformation from a religious offense to a class and cultural crime.

From extensive archival and literary research, Joss Marsh reconstructs a unified and particular account of blasphemy in Victorian England. Rewriting English history from the bottom up, she tells the forgotten stories of more than two hundred working-class “blasphemers,” like Foote, whose stubborn refusal to silence their “hooligan” voices helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today. The new standards of criminality used to judge their “word crimes” rewrote the terms of literary judgment, demoting the Bible to literary masterpiece and raising Literature as the primary standard of Victorian cultural value.”

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