Details

Subject(s)

• Religious tolerance—History [Browse]

Related name

• Laursen, John Christian [Browse]
• Nederman, Cary J. [Browse]

Summary note

• There is a Myth - easily shattered - that Western societies since the Enlightenment have been dedicated to the ideal of protecting the differences between individuals and groups, and another - too readily accepted - that before the rise of secularism in the modern period, intolerance and persecution held sway throughout Europe. In Beyond the Persecuting Society John Christian Laursen, Cary J. Nederman, and nine other scholars dismantle this second generalization.
• If intolerance and religious persecution have been at the root of some of the greatest suffering in human history, it is nevertheless the case that toleration was practiced and theorized in medieval and early modern Europe on a scale few have realized.
• Beyond the Persecuting Society constructs a mosaic of pieces of the history of toleration in the Middle Ages, the long sixteenth century, and the seventeenth century. Christians and Jews, the English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and Spanish had their proponents of and experiments with tolerance well before John Locke penned his famous Letter Concerning Toleration, the authors demonstrate.
• Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar Menahem ben Solomon Ha-Me'iri to the rejection of intolerance in the "New Israel" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Beyond the Persecuting Society offers a detailed and decisive correction to a vision of the past as any less complex in its embrace and abhorrence of diversity than the present.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• General Introduction: Political and Historical Myths in the Toleration Literature / John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman
• Pt. I. The Medieval Balance
• Introduction: Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance in Medieval Europe / Cary J. Nederman. 1. Peter Abelard and the Enigma of Dialogue / Constant J. Mews. 2. Toleration, Skepticism, and the "Clash of Ideas": Principles of Liberty in the Writings of John Salisbury / Cary J. Nederman. 3. Ha-Me'iri's Theory of Religious Toleration / Gary Remer
• Pt. II. The Long Sixteenth Century
• Introduction: The Transformation of the Long Sixteenth Century / Randolph C. Head. 4. "Heretics be not in all thing heretics": Cardinal Pole, His Circle, and the Potential for Toleration / Thomas F. Mayer. 5. The Concept of Toleration in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin / Marion Leathers Kuntz.
• 6. Religious Coexistence and Confessional Conflict in the Vier Dorfer: Practices of Toleration in Eastern Switzerland, 1525-1615 / Randolph C. Head
• Pt. III. The Seventeenth Century
• Introduction: Contexts and Paths to Toleration in the Seventeenth Century / John Christian Laursen. 7. Samuel von Pufendorf and Toleration / Detlef Doring. 8. Baylean Liberalism: Tolerance Requires Nontolerance / John Chritian Laursen. 9. "Religion Set the World at Odds": Deism and the Climate of Religious Tolerance in the Works of Aphra Behn / Arlen Feldwick and Cary J. Nederman. 10. Skepticism About Religion and Millenarian Dogmatism: Two Sources of Toleration in the Seventeenth Century / Richard H. Popkin. 11. The Problem of Toleration in the New Israel: Religious Communalism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts / H. Frank Way.

Show 5 more Contents items

ISBN

• 081223331X (alk. paper)
• 0812215672 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

97026795

OCLC

37211323

RCP

C - S

Statement on responsible collection description

Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...