Livre Covetous of Truth: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 15931676: 9780792319269

     Thomas White in the quatercentenary of his birth is due for historical rehabilitation English Catholic priest philosopher theologian and scientist he was a renowned and notorious figure in his own day and though long forgot xad ten his work exemplifies aspects of major current concern to historians of ideas in particular the significance of the newly revived sceptical philosophy the complexity ofthe transition from scholasticism to the new philosophy and the whole role of minor non canonical figures in the historyofthought White s writings embrace theology politics and natural philosophy or science and in all these three areas his work after centuries of comparative neglect has slowly been resurfacing His theological significance received intermittent recognition through the eighteenth nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but more recently his great importance as leader of a whole Blackloist faction of English Catholics has become increasingly clear Condemned by co religionists in his own time as a dangerous heretic he has been assessed by modem scholars as an anticipator of twentieth century trends in Catholic theology and even as probably after John Henry Newman the most original thinker as yet producedby modem English Catholicism 2 Blackloism implied not only a theological but also a political position and that position was clarified and publicised by White in his single political treatise The Grounds of Obedience and Government published in the mid xad 1650s His provocative stance was widely misunderstood and misinterpreted and was soon anyway rendered untenable by the restoration of the monarchy