Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment
Title | Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Eric MacPhail |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 225 |
Release | 2019-11-22 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1000767469 |
This new study examines the relationship of atheism to religious tolerance from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in a broad array of literary texts and political and religious controversies written in Latin and the vernacular primarily in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The main authors featured are Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, Dirck Coornhert, Justus Lipsius, Gisbertus Voetius, the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus, and Pierre Bayle. These authors reflect and inform changing attitudes to religious tolerance inspired by a complete reconceptualization of atheism over the course of three centuries of literary and intellectual history. By integrating the history of tolerance in the history of atheism, Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist’s Progress should prove stimulating to historians of philosophy as well as literary specialists and students of Reformation history.
Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment
Title | Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Eric MacPhail |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 192 |
Release | 2019-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781003009603 |
"This new study examines the relationship of atheism to religious tolerance from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in a broad array of literary texts and political and religious controversies written in Latin and the vernacular primarily in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The main authors featured are Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, Dirck Coornhert, Justus Lipsius, Gisbertus Voetius, the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus, and Pierre Bayle. These authors reflect and inform changing attitudes to religious tolerance inspired by a complete reconceptualization of atheism over the course of three centuries of literary and intellectual history. By integrating the history of tolerance in the history of atheism, Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress should prove stimulating to historians of philosophy as well as literary specialists and students of Reformation history"--
Beyond the Persecuting Society
Title | Beyond the Persecuting Society PDF eBook |
Author | John Christian Laursen |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 297 |
Release | 2011-07-18 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0812205863 |
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.
Discourses of Tolerance & Intolerance in the European Enlightenment
Title | Discourses of Tolerance & Intolerance in the European Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Hans Erich Bödeker |
Publisher | University of Toronto Press |
Pages | 519 |
Release | 2008-12-22 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1442691360 |
The principle of tolerance is one of the most enduring legacies of the Enlightenment. However, scholarly works on the topic to date have been primarily limited to traditional studies based on a historical, 'progressive' view or to the critiques of contemporary writers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and MacIntyre, who believed that the core beliefs of the Enlightenment, including tolerance, could actually be used as vehicles of repression and control rather than as agents promoting individual and group freedom.This collection of original essays by a distinguished international group of contributors looks at the subject in a new light and from a number of angles, focusing on the concept of tolerance at the point where the individual, or group, converges or clashes with the state. The volume opens with introductory essays that provide essential background to the major shift in thinking in regard to tolerance that occurred during the eighteenth century, while considering the general problem of writing a history of tolerance. The remaining essays, organized around two central themes, trace the expansion of the discourses of tolerance and intolerance. The first group treats tolerance and intolerance in relation to the spheres of religious and political thought and practice. The second examines the extension of broad issues of tolerance and intolerance in the realms of race, gender, deviancy, and criminality. While offering an in-depth consideration of these complex issues in the context of the Enlightenment, the volume sheds light on many similar challenges facing contemporary society.
Toleration in Enlightenment Europe
Title | Toleration in Enlightenment Europe PDF eBook |
Author | Ole Peter Grell |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 282 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0521651964 |
This 1999 book is a systematic pan-European survey of the theory, practice, and very real limits to toleration in eighteenth-century Europe.
How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Title | How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West PDF eBook |
Author | Perez Zagorin |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 390 |
Release | 2005-10-09 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0691121427 |
Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. Perez Zagorin takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which Zagorin traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West. Here we see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers--writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives--contributed far more than did political expediency or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause of toleration. Reading these thinkers--from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others--Zagorin brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. His book--which ranges from England through the Netherlands, the post-1685 Huguenot Diaspora, and the American Colonies--also exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom. A far-reaching and incisive discussion of the major writers, thinkers, and controversies responsible for the emergence of religious tolerance in Western society--from the Enlightenment through the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights--this original and richly nuanced work constitutes an essential chapter in the intellectual history of the modern world.
How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Title | How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West PDF eBook |
Author | Perez Zagorin |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 390 |
Release | 2013-12-03 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1400850711 |
Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. Perez Zagorin takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which Zagorin traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West. Here we see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers--writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives--contributed far more than did political expediency or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause of toleration. Reading these thinkers--from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others--Zagorin brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. His book--which ranges from England through the Netherlands, the post-1685 Huguenot Diaspora, and the American Colonies--also exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom. A far-reaching and incisive discussion of the major writers, thinkers, and controversies responsible for the emergence of religious tolerance in Western society--from the Enlightenment through the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights--this original and richly nuanced work constitutes an essential chapter in the intellectual history of the modern world.