Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Many don't realise that the freedom we experience today is due to the long development of an attitude of toleration. This book gives an excellent account, through a variety of essays on how this move was made possible. It is very readable, and is suitable for the beginner who has an interest in the subject, or the more advanced student/lecturer who appreciates the accuracy and depth that this book has to offer.
Please give this book a go - it is a highly facinating subject, and you will not be disappointed. I strongly recommend everyone develop an understanding of such important subject matter. Many today argue that morality be enforced by the law - without understanding the complexity and history behind the move to remove it. It is through toleration that the quality of our lives today are made possible. If you want a better understanding of this development, I have read an abundance of material, and I can honestly say, that this title is one of the best. Give it a go.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment


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.

Get 10% OFF

Click here for more information about Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment