Early Modern Arguments for Toleration

Abstract

Although institutional arrangements that ensured protection for unpopular or controversial minority groups appear across a range of historical contexts, scholars have long focused on the early modern period as particularly important in the history of toleration. Originating in debates over the rights of dissenters from legally established or socially dominant churches, the vocabulary and institutional practices associated with religious toleration assumed greater sophistication in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. This chapter explores the main lines of argumentation in seventeenth-century England as both significant in its own right and influential in shaping future debates over the rights of dissenting and marginalized groups. After a few introductory remarks about the conceptual dimensions of religious toleration, I lay out the primary arguments advanced by tolerationists, as well as those presented by their opponents. I then focus on one particular individual, William Penn, theorist of religious liberty in England and, later, founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, where he hoped to put his tolerationist principles into practice. I conclude with some brief reflections on the role played by religious toleration in the larger struggles for more expansive understandings of liberty in the modern world.