Early Modern Arguments for Toleration
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 tole
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Toleration: Conceptual, Political, and Historical Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Toleration in Seventeenth-Century England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Antitolerationist Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Case Study: The Career of William Penn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Summary and Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
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. A. R. Murphy (*) Department of Political Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Sardoĉ (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03227-2_4-1
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A. R. Murphy
Keywords
Toleration · Penn, William · Locke, John · Liberty of conscience · Conscience · Restoration · Persecution · Religious liberty · Cromwell, Oliver
Introduction The concept of toleration – its connection with related terms like tolerance, rel
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