"Little Religion" but "Admirable Morals": Christianity and Honor in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

The role of freethinking in Aphra Behn's work is a neglected area of study that is just beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Line Cottegnies has recently examined Behn's important but often overlooked translations of Bernard de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes, translated as A Discovery of New Worlds, and Histoire des oracles, translated as The History of Oracles and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests, both published in 1688. The two works are classic texts of the early French Enlightenment. Behn's Fontenelle translations are subjected to detailed analysis in Sarah Ellenzweig's study of literary freethinking in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, The Fringes of Belief. Here, Pacheco argues that Behn's representation of the Christian religion in Oroonoko draws on a considerably more polemeical and outspoken strain of early Enlightenment thought than Ellenzweig's study would allow and that this in turn produces a radical questioning of the social value of Christianity directed in part at the conduct of a king identified overwhelmingly with his zeal for the Roman Catholic faith.