Beyond the persecuting society : religious toleration before the Enlightenment / edited by John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Laursen, John Christian.

Nederman, Cary J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religious tolerance--History.

Religious tolerance.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (296 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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: 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. Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar, Menahem ben Solomon Ha-MeIiri, 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.

Contents:

pt. 1. The medieval balance

pt. 2. The long sixteenth century

pt. 3. The seventeenth century.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283896290

128389629X

9780812205862

0812205863

OCLC:

605167333