Conyers Middleton was an English historian and clergyman; he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1700. He took orders in the Church of England and became a fellow of his college, but he had to resign his fellowship at the time of his first marriage in 1710. He held various livings but never obtained any considerable preferment in the church. The course of Middleton's life unfortunately provides several grounds for questioning his integrity and ingenuousness.

Middleton's first major publication was A Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism (London, 1729). His theme was certainly not entirely original. It can, for instance, be traced to Part IV of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), and there is even some suspicion of plagiarism at the expense of a little-known French treatise, Conformité des cérémonies modernes avec les anciennes (Leiden, 1667). What was remarkable was the force and skill...