Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England

This book offers the first full account of life after death and the changing concepts of heaven and hell in English thought from 1650-1750. It explores seventeenth and eighteenth century images of the journey of body and soul from Platonist accounts of preexistence, to the intermediate state between death and the Last Day, to the Final Judgment and beyond into heaven or hell. It discloses a society radically different from our own, in which frail and fleeting human life was lived out in the expectation of salvation or damnation, eternal happiness or torment.