Toleration of differing religious ideas exists in parts of the contemporary world, but it is still not clear how this came about. Recent work has uncovered the enormous importance one branch of historiography has had in bringing about such tolerance as we have: histories of heresy. This book brings together experts in this field in order to attempt to map out the contours and features of the influence of these histories on early modern and modern conceptions of toleration. Perhaps by showing heretics and heresies to be more benign than once thought, these histories could tease tolerance from...

Reminiscent of More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Denis Veiras's History of the Sevarambians is one of the great utopian novels of the seventeenth century. Set in Australia, this rollicking adventure story comes complete with a shipwreck, romantic tales, religious fraud, magical talismans, and supernatural animals. The current volume contains two versions of Veiras's story: the original English and the 1738 English translation of the expanded French version. Veiras's work was well known in its own time and has been translated into a number of languages, including German, French,...

Any number of misconceptions about millenarians and messianism in the early modern period will be laid to rest by a reading of this volume. It is too often thought that millenarianism was largely an English phenomenon. One of the reasons for bringing these studies together is to show, as Martin Mulsow puts it, that we can understand this European-wide movement as a "millenarian international" in analogy with the later "socialist international." Another misconception is that millenarianism and messianism were a world apart from mainstream developments in intellectual history; but, as Mulsow...

Beyond the Persecuting Society constructs a history of toleration from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. 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....

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to a large diaspora of French Huguenots, known as the Refuge. Spreading throughout Europe, many of these Huguenots used their literary and polemical talents in the development of political ideas that would help them in their efforts to return to France, or in their adjustment to living outside of France. Arguably, their predicament turned some of them into cosmopolitans and instigated their contributions to the theory and practice of freedom of the press and economic freedom. As in the case of other diaspora cultures, expulsion from...

This volume contains English translations of two important early French and German defences of freedom of the press. Almost unknown in the English-speaking world, these texts demonstrate that freedom of the press was an important issue in other parts of Europe in the early modern period, giving rise to articulate theories. Elie Luzac's Essay on Freedom of Expression (1749) defended freedom of the press for atheists on natural law and other grounds. Carl Friedrich Bahrdt's On Freedom of the Press and its Limits (1787) drew on natural law, religious rhetoric, and political...

This is the first book to bring together studies of a wide variety of millenarians who were active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and eastern Europe.
The sheer variety of millenarian ideas and movements and their myriad of ebbs and flows and interactions teach us that millenarianism was a much more complex and influential factor than most studies have recognized. It was part and parcel of the growth of science, the progress of philosophy, and the genesis of political reform. This volume provides much food for thought for students...

In today's developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace. However, their work was certainly not perfect. In this enlightening volume, John Christian Laursen and Maria Jose Villaverde have gathered contributors to focus on the paradoxes, blindspots, unexpected flaws, or ambiguities in early modern...

Toleration of differing religious ideas exists in parts of the contemporary world, but it is still not clear how this came about. This book brings together experts in this field in order to attempt to map out the contours and features of the influence of these histories on early modern and modern conceptions of toleration.