Brief Description
Major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern Enlightenment Europe.
Learn More about the Book
John Marshall offers an extensive study of late seventeenth-century practices of religious intolerance and toleration in England, Ireland, France, Piedmont and the Netherlands and of the arguments which John Locke and his associates made in defence of 'universal religious toleration'. He analyzes early modern and early Enlightenment discussions of toleration; debates over toleration for Jews and Muslims as well as for Christians; the limits of toleration for the intolerant, atheists, 'libertines' and 'sodomites'; and the complex relationships between intolerance and resistance theories including Locke's own Treatises.
Review Quotes
1. "A powerful piece of scholarship???brilliantly conceived, breath-taking in scope, and rich in historical insight???it will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars across a range disciplines (history, religion, political science, philosophy, history of science, literature, and queer studies), and to both Europeanists and Americanists alike....Marshall??'s book is surely destined to become a classic."
- Catholic Historical Review, Tim Harris, Brown University
2. "this book is a tour de force....Marshall is to be congratulated on an important study that identifies and anatomizes the intellectual history of one of the most significant moments in early modern European history." -H-net.Albion
3. "Marshall's new text on the toleration debates should become a standard overview of the broad historical background of Locke's writing - both the toleration debates and the rise of the republic of letters." -Eighteenth Century Studies
4. "A powerful piece of scholarship - brilliantly conceived, breath-taking in scope, and rich in historical insight - it will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars across a range of disciplines (history, religion, political science, philosophy, history of science, literature, and queer studies)....a remarkable scholarly accomplishment. Marshall's book is surely destined to become a classic." -Catholic Historical Review
5. .,."this book is a tour de force. It synthesizes a wide range of the latest scholarship, and Marshall displays a penetrating and incisive understanding of English, Dutch, French, and Italian sources...Marshall is to be congratulated on an important study that identifies and anatomizes the intellectual history of one of the most significant moments in early modern European history."
-William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University, H-Albion
6. "A powerful piece of scholarship-brilliantly conceived, breath-taking in scope, and rich in historical insight-it will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars across a range disciplines (history, religion, political science, philosophy, history of science, literature, and queer studies), and to both Europeanists and Americanists alike....Marshall's book is surely destined to become a classic."
-Tim Harris, Brown University, Catholic Historical Review
7. "in his magisterial tome...Marshall undertakes the massive task of describing the intellectual, religious, political, and cultural contexts in which discourses concerning toleration developed in early modern Europe....Marshall has written an important and monumental work. Using works by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A.Pocock, and Jonathan Israel as historiographical models, Marshall seeks to provide, in appropriately Baroque detail, the full weight of arguments for and against toleration from the period of the Reformation to the late seventeenth century." -Sixteenth Century Journal
8. ."..this book is a tour de force. It synthesizes a wide range of the latest scholarship, and Marshall displays a penetrating and incisive understanding of English, Dutch, French, and Italian sources...Marshall is to be congratulated on an important study that identifies and anatomizes the intellectual history of one of the most significant moments in early modern European history."
-William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University, H-Albion
9. "Marshall 's new text on the toleration debates should become a standard overview of the broad historical background of Locke 's writing both the toleration debates and the rise of the republic of letters." -Eighteenth Century Studies
10. "this book is a tour de force .Marshall is to be congratulated on an important study that identifies and anatomizes the intellectual history of one of the most significant moments in early modern European history." -H-net.Albion"
11. "Marshall s new text on the toleration debates should become a standard overview of the broad historical background of Locke s writing both the toleration debates and the rise of the republic of letters." -Eighteenth Century Studies"
12. "in his magisterial tome Marshall undertakes the massive task of describing the intellectual, religious, political, and cultural contexts in which discourses concerning toleration developed in early modern Europe .Marshall has written an important and monumental work. Using works by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A.Pocock, and Jonathan Israel as historiographical models, Marshall seeks to provide, in appropriately Baroque detail, the full weight of arguments for and against toleration from the period of the Reformation to the late seventeenth century." -Sixteenth Century Journal"
13. "an outstanding contribution to the history of religious toleration offers the most comprehensive treatment of the subject in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the early years of the Enlightenment, that now exists." -Church History"
14. "Any intellectual historian concerned with the social and intellectual framework of toleration in the period, or with the early Enlightenment more broadly, is well served by this magisterial treatment Marshall s scholarship is tremendous an immense contribution to Lockean and late seventeenth-century scholarship." -History of Political Thought"
15. ..".this book is a tour de force. It synthesizes a wide range of the latest scholarship, and Marshall displays a penetrating and incisive understanding of English, Dutch, French, and Italian sources...Marshall is to be congratulated on an important study that identifies and anatomizes the intellectual history of one of the most significant moments in early modern European history."
-William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University, H-Albion
16. "Marshall's book is an important contribution to a hot topic...stimulating and rewarding"
-Gustavo Costa, Renaissance Quarterly
17. "A powerful piece of scholarship brilliantly conceived, breath-taking in scope, and rich in historical insight it will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars across a range of disciplines (history, religion, political science, philosophy, history of science, literature, and queer studies) .a remarkable scholarly accomplishment. Marshall s book is surely destined to become a classic." -Catholic Historical Review"
18. "This is a vast intellectual undertaking, in some measures, comparable to Quentin Skinner s Foundations (1978), which aspires to outline the historical relationship between the theory and practice of religious intolerance and tolerance in Europe after the reformation and before the Enlightenment. Like Skinner s great work, it is committed to a contextual method to explain and understand the thinking of the times." -Journal of British Studies"
