Reading the Religious Diversity of the Later Seventeenth‐Century Ottoman World: An Anglican Traveller's Perspective

Abstract

In his Account of the Present Greek Church of 1722, Dr John Covel (1638–1722), an Anglican cleric and master of Christ's College, Cambridge, reflected on how human beings, and Christians specifically, might best please God. In so doing, Covel argued that disputes over ‘meer outward forms of Godliness’, such as the acts of fasting or praying, were only important insofar as they helped worshippers to develop what he termed ‘inward affection’. For Covel, ‘inward affection’, though difficult to define, was easy to spot. It was evidenced by ‘the unfeigned Exercise of a holy Life’, which entailed the performance of good works, combined with the pursuit of more abstract virtues such as sincerity, solemnity, patience, moderation, faith and conviction. In this paper, I explore how Covel, between his education at Cambridge in the 1650s, and the publication of his Account in the 1720s, came to conceptualize the worship of God in this way, with a particular focus on the impact of his travels around the Mediterranean in the 1670s and his exposure to the religious diversity of the Ottoman world. As part of this discussion, I show how Covel's observations abroad led him to question the sharp distinctions which were presumed to exist not only among Christians but also between Christians and members of other religions, most notably Islam. Taken as a whole, this paper will make a novel contribution to our understanding of early modern ecclesiastical debates in England, by examining their frequently transcultural frames of reference.