Learned Response

Abstract Layton and Coward were remarkably successful in prompting a response from specialist scholars. In 1706, they encouraged one of the period’s most eminent scholars, Henry Dodwell, to publish for the first time a full defence of his own idiosyncratic mortalist views. Dodwell’s vernacular mortalist scholarship was an attempt by a specialist to combat what he saw as the unlearned mortalism being spread by amateurs. An unstudied notebook shows that Dodwell’s original research on the soul was undertaken decades earlier in a learned, Latinate context, yet he pursued vernacular publication to make an intervention in what was now a public debate. Dodwell was not the only scholar that Layton and Coward provoked. The formal and informal responses at Oxford reveal once again the manifold ways that the reception of ideas was shaped by social circumstances.