The Great Tew Circle was a group of clerics and literary figures who gathered in the 1630s at the manor house of Great Tew, Oxfordshire in southern England, and in London.

Lord Clarendon referred to the Circle as "A college situate in a purer air", referring to its pursuit of truth away from the partisan passions of the town. The house was the property of the noble Cary family, and the circle was brought together by Lucius Cary, who became 2nd Viscount Falkland on the death of his father in 1633. The most prominent of those taking part was Edward Hyde, the future 1st Earl of Clarendon, who after 1660 would become known as a leading statesman, and then a historian.

In the vexed religious climate of the time, the Circle was heterodox, inclining to sympathy with Socinianism. The favoured approach of some of those involved has been defined as "Arminian humanism", and in any case opposed to rigid Calvinism. In politics, their views were essentially conservative and royalist. The central religious figure of the Circle was William Chillingworth. Falkland himself had a Catholic convert, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, for his mother, and found the tolerant approach of Erasmus attractive. He organised the circle with his wife Lettice.

Major influences on the thinking of the circle were Hugo Grotius and Richard Hooker because of the place the latter made for the use of reason in Biblical interpretation and church polity. These writers formed part of the broader Christian humanist tradition of Jacobus Acontius, George Cassander, Sebastian Castellio, Bernardino Ochino and Faustus Socinus. The anti-patristic views of Jean Daillé were also significant. According to the writings of Hyde (as Lord Clarendon), the gatherings and discussions themselves were modelled on those of Cicero and Erasmus, with guests being welcome to differ on points of view. Discourse also took place around the dinner table, with Clarendon likening the "Convivium Philosophicum or Convivium Theologicum ("philosophical-" or "theological feast") to Erasmus's Convivium Religiosum ("godly feast")."

Chillingworth was influenced by Acontius, and the Circle read Acontius alongside Johannes Crellius, a Socinian. They found greater relevance in the eirenicism of Acontius than in the theology (Unitarianism) of Socinus himself. The context, as explained by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, was that of the Thirty Years' War with its Protestant defeats of the 1620s and Catholic expansion; but also of the doctrines of the contra-Remonstrants in an environment of increasing skepticism on religious matters. Falkland and Chillingworth had been seared by the "Pyrrhonian crisis" of skepticism rampant. Opposed to fideism, the Circle found in the use by Grotius of probabilism a more attractive option to deal with the challenge of skepticism.

Trevor-Roper supported the claims of the Great Tew group to the eirenic moral high ground on religious toleration and a commitment to rational dialogue on religion. This analysis has been challenged from the direction of the Circle's political thought, with its commitment to sovereignty. It has also been argued that these are two sides to the understanding of the period of the term "Socinian". The eirenic style was understood by Puritan opponents as Arminian rhetoric, and they moved away from compromise with it, to polemic and contemplation of war.

The major theologians of the circle (Chillingworth, Hales, Taylor) have regularly been claimed as precursors of the Latitudinarians, a term anachronistic before 1660. They are now considered to have paved the way for the Cambridge Platonists, in the attitude that there is no single basis for essential and true beliefs. The distinction now usual between the Cambridge Platonists and other Latitudinarians is a conventional one, introduced by John Tulloch in the 19th century.

Participation in any actual dialogues as described by Hyde is problematic to establish; and the time scale has different points on it, though a beginning date of 1634 (Martinich) seems to be agreed widely. After about 1640 the troubled political situation overshadowed theoretical discussion and writing. The influence of the circle can be traced in theological production (especially Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants, 1638), literary works and translation in a humanist vein, and the political line pursued by Falkland and Hyde in 1640–1, attempting to find a middle position between Puritan and Laudian extremes.