ABSTRACT
The description of Roanoke allows us to glimpse what Thomas Harriot and his contemporaries might have liked religion to be like - the pristine faith and practice of a prelapsarian world. Harriot's language of description had clear providential overtones as well. Whatever Harriot's views on the necessity or matter tor material creation, these were not themselves the root of the accusations of impiety or irreligion levelled against him. The questions which Harriot asked in his mathematical writings about the nature of a vacuum or a plenum were standard queries in contemporary Aristotelian philosophy. It is precisely because we cannot be certain of the answers that Harriot gave, or of whether and when he changed his mind between various positions, that we must be careful in attributing too much significance to them. Harriot's account of Indian religion, although respectful towards it, seemed to be open to the criticism that it showed religion to be little more than policy.
