The freethinkers’ zetetic society: an Edinburgh radical underworld in the eighteen‐twenties

The infidel ‘zetetic’ movement of the eighteen‐twenties has been investigated principally as an extension of Richard Carlile's metropolitan campaigns for a free press. This article employs the radical press and print culture of the time alongside legal records relating to the harassment and prosecution of the very first zetetic society to reconstruct the local contexts and controversies from which Edinburgh's infidel movement emerged. It argues that this approach, by enabling a close analysis of a zetetic society within the context of the community that created and supported it, provides a more nuanced understanding of early infidelism as a whole.