Humed Serpent: Lucian, miracles, enlightenment, and empire.

In his essay 'Of Miracles', published separately and as the final chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , David Hume enlists Lucian's Alexander, or the False Prophet as evidence for his claim that miracle narratives first take root among gullible rural populations before spreading to cultured city-dwelling elites. This essay reads Lucian's Alexander and On the Death of Peregrinus against the Humean grain to suggest that miracle stories emerge as a consequence of the forms of commerce and circulation enabled by empires. In light of this, I recharacterize Hume's geography of gullibility as an aspirational but unsustainable ideal engendered by the emergence of an eighteenth-century 'Republic of Letters'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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