ABSTRACT
John Hutchinson, whose doctrines have come to be called ‘Hutchinsonianism’, was born near Middleham in Yorkshire in 1674. By profession a land steward to the Duke of Somerset, Hutchinson in the 1720s began to expound what has been commonly regarded as a system of natural philosophy. His activity was made possible by the patronage of his employer. He attracted attention as a natural philosopher chiefly by virtue of the antiNewtonianism of his cosmology, founded on a singular mode of interpreting the unpointed Hebrew text of the Old Testament. He died in 1737, but until the first half of the nineteenth century Hutchinson’s views never ceased to attract followers.
