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Following the appointment of its first aristocratic Grand Masters in the 1720s and its connections to science and the Enlightenment, “Free and Accepted” Masonry became part of Britain’s national profile and the largest and most influential of its many clubs and societies.
The organization did not evolve naturally from the medieval guilds and religious orders, but was reconfigured radically by a self-appointed inner core of members of London’s most influential lodges. Freemasonry became a vehicle for their philosophical and political views and the “Craft” attracted an aspirational membership across the middling and gentry.
Through an examination of previously unexplored primary documents, The Foundations of Modern Freemasonry contributes to an understanding of English political and social culture and explores how Freemasonry became a mechanism that promoted the interests of the Hanoverian establishment and connected the metropolitan and provincial elites. Ric Berman explores multiple networks centered on the aristocracy, Parliament, the learned and professional societies, and the magistracy, and provides pen portraits of key individuals. This third, extended, edition includes an examination of the origins of Antients Freemasonry and the seminal influence of Laurence Dermott and the London Irish, taking the reader through to 1813, when the Moderns and Antients grand lodges merged to form the United Grand Lodge of England.
The Foundations of Modern Freemasonry has been described as one of the most important books on Freemasonry published in recent times, providing “a precise, social context for the invention of English Freemasonry.” Ric Berman has delivered an essential reference work that throws a new and original light on the formation and development of what would become a national and international phenomenon.
Publisher: The Old Stables Press
Publication date: April 14, 2026
Language: English
Print length: 317 pages
ISBN-10: 1739170857
ISBN-13: 978-1739170851
Ric Berman researches, writes, and speaks on eighteenth and nineteenth-century English, Irish and American Freemasonry. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of numerous journal articles and ten books, and has delivered keynote lectures worldwide. Ric holds an MA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter, respectively, and undertook post-doctoral research at the University of Oxford’s Modern European History Research Centre.
A Freemason for more than forty years and twice Prestonian Lecturer, VW Bro. Ric holds Grand Rank in the United Grand Lodge of England and is a Past Master of three English lodges, including Quatuor Coronati, the premier lodge of Masonic research. He is also an American Freemason, a member and honorary member of lodges in seven states, a Blue Friar, and a Fellow of the Philalethes Society. He was the Texas Lodge of Research’s Anson Jones Lecturer in 2023.
Born in London, Ric lives in rural Oxfordshire.
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