Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces

This volume offers an outline of developments in the intellectual debate on religious liberty, religious toleration and religious concord in the eighteenth-century Netherlands. Emphasizing changes in the relations between religious belief and the public sphere, it seeks to add new perspectives to recent analyses of toleration. Each chapter of this book discusses a different aspect of the eighteenth-century Dutch toleration debate. On the basis of a large number of sources, and paying particular attention to minor writers, a broad variety of topics is treated, ranging from the official Reformed confessions and legal scholarship to unionism, apologetics, sociability, and the press. This study extends contemporary analyses of early modern thought on toleration to the end of the eighteenth century.

"...thoroughly researched and written in lively and engaging style. Its content, presented in historical narratives, biographical sketches and careful expositions of published work is so rich and detailed that one might be easily distractied were it not for the clear and orderlay arrangement of its chapters, a descriptive table of contents, and chapter introductions, all of which is properly attended to will prove to be trustworthy guides." Victor Nuovo, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2005. "This book is an excellent antidote to noncontextual analyses of single works by famous authors like Spinoza, Bayle, or Lock on toleration. For example, it emerges that Locke was better known in toleration debates for his Reasonableness of Christianity than for his letters On Toleration.This book makes it clear that such authors must be situated in the larger contexts of debates among their predecessors, comtemporaries, and successors if we are to understand the real meaning and importance of their work." John Christian Laursen, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2004.

Joris van Eijnatten, Ph.D. (1993), teaches early modern history at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published extensively on Dutch intellectual and religious culture, including Mutua Christianorum Tolerantia (Olschki, 1998).