John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture

This book is a major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern and early Enlightenment Europe. 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 the arguments that John Locke and his associates made in defence of 'universal religious toleration'. He analyses 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. This study is a significant contribution to the history of the 'republic of letters' of the 1680s and the development of early Enlightenment culture and is essential reading for scholars of early modern European history, religion, political science and philosophy.

Review of the hardback: '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, Review of the hardback: '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, Review of the hardback: '… 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, Review of the hardback: '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, Review of the hardback: '… 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

John Marshall is Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (1994).