A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed peoples everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke Voltaire and Rousseau. In this landmark book familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists anticlerical Catholics pantheists pornographers readers and travelers. Margaret Jacob one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms.