Despite its reputation as an "age of reason," the early modern era was awash with the unprecedented and apparently unexplainable events; pamphlets on prodigies, prophecies, and assorted perplexities ruffled through high intellectual and popular culture alike. Miracles came in all forms, from those executed by God or Jesus in the streets of Nazareth or the seas of Israel, to those that erupted in the talking trees and haunted hills of the English landscape and those that appeared in the crystal balls of soothsayers. Every miracle, or sometimes miracles in and of themselves, generated controversy and thereby contributed to an increasingly rich fund of data about the essential values, literary peccadilloes, and generally intellectual habits of Enlightenment culture.

Above the Age of Reason: Miracles and Wonders in the Long Eighteenth Century, recovers and scrutinizes four non-canonical works representing different categories of miracles: Toussaint Bridoul's evaluation of prodigies, of odd things and events that have a supernatural resonance to them; Matthew Smith's (?) analysis of souls corporeal and incorporeal, human and animal, and the miracle of their coexistence; Thomas Sherlock's study of prophecy, miracles, clairvoyance, and prediction; and Thomas Woolston's examination of miracles as a phenomenon in their own right, with special emphasis on what might be called the classical miracles of the Bible. Together, these pamphlets compose a quartet of Enlightenment attitudes about events beyond the pale of "enlightened" rational thought, aptly figured against commentary from four leading scholars of the miraculous, prodigious, and wonderful.