Abstract
The teleological impulse permeates the historiography of tolerance. According to traditional accounts, the medieval era was characterised by religious uniformity and the persecution of dissent. With the Reformation and the fragmentation of the Christian consensus in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, a number of dissident reformers, including Roger Williams, John Locke and John Milton, began to speak out in favour of freedom of conscience. Their groundbreaking calls for the toleration of religious pluralism were echoed on the Continent in the works of Sebastian Castellio and Hugo Grotius.1 Although they were met by fierce resistance, the story goes, these pioneering figures achieved a landmark victory with the passage of the Toleration Act in 1689, and laid the foundations for an era of enlightened diversity. The seeds of the tolerationist movement were carried across the Atlantic by Puritan founding fathers such as Roger Williams and William Penn and, later on, found fertile soil in the First Amendment, guaranteeing religious liberty, and the American ethos of welcoming immigrants.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For reasons of expediency and necessary limitations of scope, this essay collection takes early modern England (and contemporary Britain) and US as its focus, while acknowledging that traditional accounts of the rise of tolerance have tended to place disproportionate emphasis on the Anglo-American arena. For European toleration, see Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007),
W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration: Papers Read at the Twenty-Second Summer Meeting and the Twenty-Third Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Ecclesiastical History Society by B. Blackwell, 1984),
Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman, eds, Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998),
Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, eds, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
and Perez Zagorin, How Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
For further reading on toleration in early modern England, see John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000),
Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),
John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
Andrew Hadfield and Matthew Dimmock, eds, The Religions of the Book: Co-Existence and Conflict, 1400–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
and Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003).
William Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647 (New York: Columbia University Press 1934),
A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938),
W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, from the Beginning of the English Reformation to the Death of Queen Elizabeth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932).
David Cameron, The Observer, 28 January 2007.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). For an overview of the Whig and revisionist approaches to toleration, see, for example, Walsham, Charitable Hatred, especially Introduction, and Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, 1–7. For further critique of the Whig approach, see Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds, Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), Introduction, and Laursen and Nederman, eds, Beyond the Persecuting Society, Introduction. Some historians have called for a nuancing of the revisionist approach, suggesting that it does not account for why developments in attitudes towards the accommodation of religious diversity did indeed occur. See, for example, Tony Claydon’s review of Walsham’s Charitable Hatred in Reviews in History, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/568, accessed 5 April 2013.
Books on modern tolerance are too numerous to mention fully: see, for example, Michael Walzer’s On Toleration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997);
Susan Mendus’s Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989);
and Anna Elizabetta Galeotti’s Toleration as Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
See Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided by Faith, Waisham’s Charitable Hatred and Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton, eds, Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England — Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Eliane Glaser
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Glaser, E. (2014). Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives. In: Glaser, E. (eds) Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43988-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02804-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)