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MILTON, LOCKE AND THE NEW HISTORY OF TOLERATION JOHN COFFEY Modern Intellectual History / Volume 5 / Issue 03 / November 2008, pp 619 - 632 DOI: 10.1017/S1479244308001820, Published online: 06 October 2008

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milton, locke and the new history of toleration john coffey School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester

John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) For three centuries now, John Milton and John Locke have been hailed as heroic advocates of religious freedom. Securely ensconced in the pantheon of liberal icons, they continue to be enlisted in the cause of liberty. In the wake of 9/11, a number of writers have retold the tale of how enlightened progressives rescued the West from the forces of theocratic repression. Milton and Locke loom large in that story. They have starring roles in Perez Zagorin’s study of How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (2003), and they feature prominently as “two champions of liberty” in the philosopher A. C. Grayling’s book Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (2007).1 Whig history is not dead yet. Indeed, Grayling is refreshingly honest about his old-fashioned liberalism—in the British edition, his book’s dust jacket is laid out like the title page of a nineteenth-century pamphlet: “By Mr. A. C. Grayling. London. Printed in the Year 2007”. But the rising controversy over religion, secularism and identity politics has prompted another, very different, reaction. Whereas some insist that now is the time to reassert Western Enlightenment values, others have started to question the traditional liberal metanarrative with its linear progress from persecution to toleration. Post-Christian Europe, a continent that had supposedly completed the long trek to freedom, is now learning all over again that problems of difference

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Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 213–24 (Milton), 245–67 (Locke); A. C. Grayling, Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 63–79, 63.

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and otherness are not so easily resolved. Instead of celebrating the decisive break with intolerant ideologies, revisionist historians of toleration turn to the grass roots to show that coexistence has always been a challenging proposition, and that tolerance and intolerance exist in a symbiotic relationship. In two major recent books by Alex Walsham and Benjamin Kaplan, religious intolerance features not as a vanquished foe slain by brave intellectuals, but as a persistent (almost endemic) feature of human communities, albeit one often checked by practical tolerance.2 In this new wave of toleration studies, the history of ideas is demoted. Pride of place is given to a social and cultural history of religious identities. Yet for all that, interest in the leading tolerationist writers remains strong. Indeed, fresh approaches to the subject have given it a new lease of life. Two recent books—an edited collection on Milton, and a major monograph on Locke— represent the cutting edge of current research and reflect major trends in studies of toleration. Whereas previous studies have typically concentrated on Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration (1689), together with other less-known texts on church–state relations, these new books cite the entire range of writings by Milton and Locke. They argue that these thinkers engage issues of toleration and intolerance throughout their writings. Thus Milton’s epic poems and Locke’s epistemology are as relevant to the historian of toleration as their explicitly tolerationist pamphlets. In contrast to the older scholarship, which was preoccupied with the policy of the state towards religious dissent (and the intellectual controversy surrounding it), these books widen their focus. The Milton volume, in particular, often turns aside from issues of church and state, but in both books the objects of tolerance or intolerance are not simply religious dissenters, but also “behavioural minorities”, especially those whom we might call sexual nonconformists. Whereas the traditional scholarship typically celebrated the liberalism of Milton and Locke, these studies emphasize the limits of their tolerance. Their well-known denial of toleration to Catholics is explored afresh, but so is their attitude towards libertinism and sodomy. Whilst James Grantham Turner makes a case for Milton’s openness to the libertine literature of writers like the “notorious ribald” Pietro Aretino, his fellow contributors note Milton’s approval of the 1650 Blasphemy Act which targeted the loose living of the “Ranters”. Marshall documents the polemical associations between heresy and sexual deviance, and shows how Locke and his allies worked to decouple the two, defending religious heterodoxy while excluding the licentious from toleration. 2

Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

milton, locke and the new history of toleration

Finally, whereas Milton and Locke have often been depicted as quintessentially English figures, these books situate them in a broad European context. We are reminded that both men were European intellectuals working within European traditions and (on occasion) writing works in Latin for an elite European audience. Their English contexts are certainly not ignored, but they no longer dominate. If nineteenth-century Whig historians sometimes presented Milton and Locke as lonely heroes, men in advance of their time, these books place each man among allies. Of course, the enterprise of contextualizing Milton and Locke is hardly novel—it has been going on since the great Victorian biographies by David Masson and H. R. Fox Bourne. But each of these books enriches our sense of context, and Marshall’s monograph is particularly illuminating on the tolerationist networks to which Locke belonged. That these books have much in common owes something to the common characteristics of their subjects. Milton the radical Puritan poet was a very different figure from Locke the heterodox Anglican philosopher, and belonged to an older generation. One had been educated at Cambridge in the 1620s, the other at Oxford in the 1650s. But the Christ’s College of Joseph Mede and the Christ Church of John Owen were institutions with a serious commitment to Reformed Protestantism. It is hardly surprising that Milton and Locke each developed a lifelong fascination with theology, and together with figures like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton helped to make the seventeenth century the great age of English lay theologians. Both Milton and Locke developed anti-Trinitarian sympathies, though (like Newton) they kept their most controversial ideas in manuscript. Both were notorious as theorists of armed resistance. If Milton was the leading defender of the revolution of 1648–9, Locke was popularly seen as the leading apologist for the revolution of 1688–9, even if his Letter concerning Toleration (1689) and his Two Treatises (1690) were composed some years before. Finally, both became radical tolerationists who drew limits to toleration in similar places (though sometimes for different reasons). The two volumes under review are somewhat ambivalent about the tolerationist credentials of their subjects. On the one hand, they complicate our image of these famous figures. This is particularly true of the Milton collection, which replaces a liberal icon with a series of contrasting portraits, and firmly plants the “intolerant Milton” (2) alongside the more familiar and reassuring tolerationist. Marshall, for his part, emphasizes that the devout Locke advocated toleration for the religious, not for the irreligious or the licentious. And yet, after all the revisionist caveats, these books tend to reaffirm the centrality of toleration to Milton and Locke, and the prominent place of both men in our histories of toleration. Freedom of religion was one of their consuming passions, one of the great issues of their day, and one that they addressed directly or indirectly in numerous works throughout their long careers. When placed against the

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backdrop of what seemed like overwhelming contemporary support for coercive uniformity in religion, their defence of extensive toleration still looks both radical and bold.

∗∗∗ Milton and Toleration is published to coincide with the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth in 1608, for which one of its editors curated an outstanding exhibition at the Bodleian Library.3 The book brings together fourteen leading British and North American Miltonists, all located in departments of literature, though there is a perceptive Afterword by the historian Ann Hughes, who observes that literary scholars are more likely than historians to share “a personal identification with Milton”, to appeal to “grand narratives of liberalism and modernity”, and to draw on Milton “to address contemporary problems” (303– 4). Some of the essays do wear their “presentist” preoccupations on their sleeves, and there are obligatory references to the vigorous debate stirred by John Carey’s post-9/11 claim that Milton’s Samson is a terrorist.4 But the scholars writing here are among the most historically minded of Miltonists, and the book does a fine job of placing the tolerationist Milton within his original contexts. Nigel Smith gets things started with a perceptive survey of “the European contexts of toleration”, and other essays consider Milton alongside English tolerationists like William Walwyn, John Goodwin, Roger Williams and Andrew Marvell. Later chapters shed light on Milton’s immersion in a wider European intellectual culture, exploring his engagements with Grotius, Giordano Bruno and the Polish Socinians. And there are valuable thematic treatments of Milton’s attitudes to Catholicism, anti-Trinitarianism, the Irish and Islam. Although David Loewenstein reminds us of Thomas Edwards and the fear of heresy in the 1640s, the book gives much more space to tolerationists than to their critics, something that can distort our perceptions, making Milton seem less radical than he appeared in his own time. Of course, the Miltonic oeuvre has been combed so intensively over the past fifty years that it is a challenge to say something new about him. The chapters in this volume are always elegant and sophisticated, but in the absence of surprising revelations they rely on recontextualizing familiar texts and finding fresh angles of approach. For this reviewer, the most stimulating pieces were those that tried to illuminate particular moments in Milton’s intellectual development. In a subtle 3

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‘Citizen Milton’, curated by Sharon Achinstein. See http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/ citizenmilton/. For this debate see Albert Labriola and Michael Lieb, eds., Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text and Terrorism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006).


and learned essay, Jason Rosenblatt highlights the stark contrast between the harsh dogmatism of the anti-prelatical tracts (1640–42) and the ethical flexibility of the divorce tracts (1643–5). He suggests that the key intellectual stimulus softening Milton’s outlook came from the works of Grotius and Selden which he was studying in 1642 and 1643. Exposed to the new, minimalist natural law theory, with its strong sense of cultural diversity and its sympathetic treatment of the Mosaic polity, Milton made room for moral complexity and ambiguity (though that is not always evident in his later works). In a more speculative essay, Martin Dzelzainis works backwards from 1674 in an effort to pinpoint the moment when Milton broke with Trinitarianism. He picks up on Milton’s statement in the preface to De Doctrina Christiana that he came to agree with “the so-called heretical writers” by studying “the blunders of those who are styled orthodox”. Dzelzainis suggests that Milton may be referring to the Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard whose nine-volume Locorum Theologicorum contained an exhaustive refutation of the Socinians’ Racovian Catechism, and was being read by Milton in the mid-1640s. It is a plausible hypothesis, though there is a case for placing Milton’s break with Trinitarian Calvinism rather later, given his (debatable) reference to “Arian and Pelagian heresies” in 1649.5 My main complaint about the book is anticipated by Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer in their introduction: “Some readers may be frustrated at the lack of precision about what is that ‘toleration’ our contributors have found in Milton” (3). Milton and Toleration contains fine discussions of rhetorical vehemence, national identity, transgressive reading practices, dialogue and the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost. But too often we lose sight of “toleration” as that term was understood by Milton and his contemporaries. Avoiding a precise definition makes for rich and varied fare, but readers may find the smorgasbord confusing. As Ann Hughes notes, the book “gives us many different Miltons” (302). Still, this is a distinguished and stimulating collection, and contains much that will satisfy both Miltonists and historians of toleration.

∗∗∗ John Marshall’s magnum opus is a more coherent book, as one would expect of a monograph. The title is a little misleading, for this is much more than a study of Locke and toleration, but also something less. It ranges far more widely than Marshall’s previous book, which was resolutely focused on Locke

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Dzelzainis’s argument is considered by Blair Worden in his important new book Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 240 n.

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himself.6 It offers a panoramic survey of persecution and toleration (and of how they were justified) in England, France and the Netherlands, followed by a critical reassessment of one of the major turning points in European intellectual history—the birth of the “early Enlightenment” in the Dutch republic during the 1680s and 1690s. Marshall self-consciously places himself within the Cambridge School of intellectual history, and employs the contextualist methodology commended by Quentin Skinner and John Pocock. But whereas those authors have principally been interested in linguistic contexts, Marshall is equally concerned with political and even social contexts. The result is a work of prodigious scope and ambition, one that should now be read alongside the recent books of Jonathan Israel as a key work on the early European Enlightenment.7 The book comes in three parts. Part I explores the practical contexts. Part II opens up the intellectual contexts. Only in Part III do we reach the early Enlightenment. Together, Parts I and II cover some 450 pages, though in its first draft the book was apparently much longer. Locke makes the occasional appearance, but essentially this is a massive exercise in scene-setting. Here Marshall reaps where others have sown, harvesting a bumper crop of scholarship on persecution and toleration—intensive use of primary sources is largely concentrated in Part III. The bibliography contains eight pages of primary sources in Latin, French and English, and twenty-six pages of secondary sources, though a few valuable studies are overlooked.8 The index is little more than a name index, and even that has omissions. And there are some minor factual errors.9 But such slips are inevitable in a work of this length, and they do not detract from what is a remarkable 6

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John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); idem, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Among the significant works omitted from the bibliography are Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Andrew Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Hans Hillberbrand, Sebastian Castellio, 1515–1563: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003). Some of these omissions are explained by the fact that the book was drafted in 2000 and 2001. For example, Origen was a Father of the third century, not the second (200); Milton’s Latin defences of the republic did receive widespread European circulation, but this was not true of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written for a British audience (226); Roger Williams is perhaps best described as a “Seeker” rather than a Baptist by the time he published The Bloody Tenent, and that book appeared in 1644, not 1646 (327).


achievement. The book is a veritable treasure trove for historians of toleration, and Parts I and II constitute a compelling synthesis of existing research. Moreover, the scene-setting does its job very effectively. It helps us to see just what Locke and his allies were up against. Marshall gives appropriate space to early tolerationists such as Castellio, Coornhert, Episcopius, the Socinians and English Civil War radicals, but he also shows why Pierre Bayle was right to say that “the doctrine of toleration is received only in a few dark corners of Christianity while that of nontoleration goes about everywhere” (200).10 The book conveys the sheer weight of anti-tolerationist opinion in post-Reformation Europe, reminding us that to “every one of the leading magisterial Reformation thinkers of the sixteenth century . . . toleration was simply a ‘diabolic doctrine’” (325). This may be too emphatic, but there can be no doubt that Pierre Jurieu and other defenders of religious coercion were correct to claim that they spoke for the mainstream Protestant tradition. And if we are tempted to think that such ideas were losing ground by the late seventeenth century, Marshall provides compelling evidence that the 1680s were “one of the most religiously repressive decades in European history” (17). By the end of Part II, we know much of what Locke and Bayle knew about the practice and theory of persecution in early modern Europe (plus a good deal else besides). Marshall immerses the reader in the persecutory landscape of the post-Reformation until one almost forgets that “the rise of toleration” is imminent, and learns to see the world as Locke himself must have seen it. That, in itself, is an important contribution to historical understanding. Of course, seeing things through the eyes of one’s subjects can be limiting too. Does Marshall resist the temptation to replicate the narrative structure created by his “early Enlightenment” writers (and discussed in chapter 20)? I am not sure. Parts I and II powerfully document the intolerance of post-Reformation Europe; Part III analyses the turning point of the 1680s and 1690s when a small band of enlightened tolerationists launched the fightback against what Locke called the “Empire of Darkness” (10). Inevitably, there is a whiff of Whiggishness here, as we see progressives battling it out with reactionaries like Bossuet and Jurieu. Of course, however unfashionable, such Whiggishness may be no bad thing, and it is hard to see how modern liberals can avoid it without bracketing their own political commitments. But Marshall could have done more to add shades of gray to his picture of pre-Enlightenment England and France; there is little acknowledgement of the practice of toleration in local communities.11 As it

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The quotation is from Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, “Compel them to Come In, That My House May be Full”, ed. John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 554. For which see Walsham, Charitable Hatred; and Kaplan, Divided by Faith.

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stands, the story is perhaps too black and white, though it captures the bleakness of the early 1680s more powerfully than any previous study. Part III brings us to “the early Enlightenment”. Marshall is scrupulous in placing the term within inverted commas, alerting readers to its controversial status. But his book provides a formidable defence of the concept of an early Enlightenment, with “universal religious toleration” as “its central value”, and “the republic of letters” as “its main cultural form” (1). The Enlightenment of Locke and his allies, argues Marshall, was both a set of commitments (to “tolerance”, “civility” and “humanity”), and “a set of practices and processes of criticism and conversation, enquiry and curiosity” (517). His most original chapter is on tolerationist associations (chapter 16). Here Marshall analyses the “handful of writers” who gathered in the Dutch Republic in the 1680s and 1690s to advance the cause of toleration. Two were Dutch (Philip van Limborch and Adriaan van Paets), but the rest were immigrants, most of whom had experienced or feared persecution in France or England. Among them were four Huguenot refugees (Pierre Bayle, Henri Basnage de Beauval, Isaac Papin, Charles Le Cène): a refugee from Calvinist Geneva (Jean Le Clerc), a convert from Catholicism (Aubert de Versé), an Englishman (Locke) and a Scot (Gilbert Burnet). Drawing on published correspondence, the manuscripts of Locke and van Limborch, and the journals published by Le Clerc and Bayle, Marshall provides a meticulous reconstruction of the mutual support networks formed by these remarkable individuals. We learn of how they met in three distinct but overlapping conversational circles: one hosted by the radical Quaker Benjamin Furly, whose Rotterdam home housed his extensive library of heterodox books; another centred on Pierre Bayle, who lived within a few blocks of Furly; and a third gathering around the Arminian professors Van Limborch and Le Clerc in Amsterdam. United in their hostility to religious persecution, the participants in these networks exchanged books, financed each others’ projects, discussed their writings, edited and translated for one another, wrote letters of introduction, and founded three influential journals to review new work from “the republic of letters”. Their project was assisted by the new science, which promoted critical enquiry, naturalistic explanations of events, polite gentlemanly conduct, trans-confessional networks, and an educated lay public. Capitalizing on the unique freedoms afforded in the cosmopolitan cities of the Dutch Republic, the tolerationists found themselves, suggests Marshall, “at the epicentre of the early Enlightenment” (493). In tracing the connections between his leading men, Marshall is careful to explain the differences and tensions between them. Aubert de Versé and Papin reconverted to intolerant Catholicism, Le Clerc had a bitter falling out with Bayle, Burnet became increasingly worried by Le Clerc’s Socinian tendencies. Even so, Jonathan Israel has argued that Marshall “too readily brackets together the small


minority of pro-tolerationists”, and downplays “the prolonged and striking noncolloboration and lack of warmth governing the Locke–Bayle relationship”.12 This criticism is part of the latest round in a long tug of war over Bayle. Israel is keen to claim him for the “Radical Enlightenment” of Spinoza, whereas Marshall aligns him with the “Moderate Enlightenment” of Locke. The struggle is sustained by the irreducible ambivalence of Bayle’s own texts, which clearly contributed to both streams of the European Enlightenment. But Bayle’s unique intellectual profile also distinguished him from both the rational religion of Locke and Le Clerc and the irreligious rationalism associated with Spinoza.13 Marshall is more inclined than Israel to let Bayle be Bayle, and he explicitly sets aside the (insoluble?) problem of whether the sceptical Huguenot was a fideist or an atheist. Instead, he provides concrete evidence of various connections between Bayle and Locke, and makes a strong case for their participation in overlapping tolerationist networks. Israel’s more compelling objection concerns Marshall’s silence on Spinoza, who merits only a few mentions. Insofar as Marshall wants to argue for the Dutch origins of the Enlightenment, this is problematic. His reasoning, one suspects, is that the case for Spinoza’s significance has already been forcefully put by Israel, and that Spinoza was not a part of the networks he himself is exploring. But Israel insists that it is “almost inconceivable that Locke was not consciously responding to Spinoza”. Locke’s claim to be “not so well read in Hobbes and Spinoza” should not be taken seriously, given that his library contained all the major works of the famous Jewish writer.14 Some discussion of the Jewish philosopher and his intellectual relationship with the moderate Protestant Enlightenment of Locke would not have gone amiss. Another silence, equally striking in its own way, is the absence of German voices. By focusing on the triangular relationship between England, France and the Netherlands, the book risks giving the impression that this is where the action was, that the Enlightenment was an Anglo-Dutch creation, or rather the creation of a collection of mostly e´ migré intellectuals operating out of the Dutch Republic. Indeed, Marshall writes that the “republic of letters” had “its territorial base in the hub of international publication in the Netherlands” (157). It may well be true that there was nothing elsewhere in Europe to rival the intellectual ferment in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, but in the German-speaking world around this time we do see the emergence of another version of the moderate Protestant Enlightenment. Marshall notes that Pufendorf was a much

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Jonathan Israel, “Review of John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture”, English Historical Review 122 (2007), 1043–4. See Adam Sutcliffe, “Spinoza, Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty”, History of European Ideas 34 (2008), 66–76. Israel, “Review”, 1044.

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more cautious tolerationist than Locke or Bayle, but he is mentioned just twice according to the index, while Leibniz and Thomasius are not cited at all. The wider developments among Europe’s Protestant intelligentsia deserve greater acknowledgement.15 The final chapters of the book survey the “flotilla of arguments” (471) employed by these “early Enlightenment” tolerationists—political and economic, historical and epistemological, philological and theological and ethical. These chapters are full of intriguing material, and they provide a lucid account of the various lines of argument. For a historian of earlier toleration debates, what is striking is the familiarity of the arguments. Locke and especially Bayle do take the epistemological or sceptical case for toleration to a new level of sophistication, but few of the arguments Marshall summarizes would have surprised John Milton. If anything, Marshall underplays the prominent role of biblical arguments for toleration in Bayle, Locke and Van Limborch. What sets these “early Enlightenment” tolerationists apart from earlier writers is their systematic approach, their monumental scholarship and their impact on the republic of letters. Their explicitly tolerationist tracts were just one part of a grand intellectual project embodied in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, Van Limborch’s Historia Inquisitionis and Theologia Christiana, and Bayle’s Dictionnaire. These major scholarly texts cemented the fame of their authors, lent new credibility to the tolerationist case, and challenged the dogmatism of persecutors more effectively than any number of ephemeral pamphlets. Hardly anyone in the eighteenth century read William Walwyn (who had even heard of him?); untold numbers studied John Locke. As well as surveying the main lines of argument, Marshall uses Part III to probe the limits of toleration in Locke and his allies, scrutinizing their attitudes

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Such developments were explored at a conference held at the British Academy in April 2007 entitled Natural Law and Toleration in Early Enlightenment Europe. Alongside papers on Locke, there were presentations on Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Leibniz, Barbeyrac and Francis Hutcheson. See also Detlef Döring, “Samuel von Pufendorf and toleration”, in John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 178–96; Simone Zurbuchen, “Samuel Pufendorf’s concept of toleration”, in Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 163–84; Michael Seidler, “The Politics of Self-Preservation: Toleration and Identity in Pufendorf and Locke”, in Tim Hochstrasser and Peter Schröder, eds., Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 227–56; and Ian Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).


to Jews, Muslims and pagans, the intolerant, Roman Catholics, atheists and sexual deviants. The book finishes in mid-air, with a final chapter on the limits of toleration (culminating in a discussion of libertines and sodomites), but no conclusion. This is odd, but perhaps oddly appropriate. Marshall has made a powerful case for the pivotal importance of his “early Enlightenment” tolerationists, but he ends by reminding us that they drew the boundaries of toleration in different places than modern secular liberals. Indeed, one might argue that our late modern culture wars (including the current clash between “the new atheists” and their theistic critics) are not a simple conflict between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment; they can be traced back to profound tensions within the Enlightenment itself, between its self-consciously Christian proponents and their secular rivals.

∗∗∗ Where, in conclusion, do these books leave the history of toleration? While both volumes reflect new trends, they are unlikely to satisfy those who believe that “enlightened thinkers” like Milton and Locke have already enjoyed too much time in the limelight. As we have already noted, the traditional emphasis on tolerationist ideas is increasingly viewed as passé, or at least of secondary importance. In part, this is because early modern toleration debates have been so thoroughly excavated that there is little left to uncover, or so it is thought. By contrast, the new social and cultural history has a greater capacity to surprise. But there is a deeper objection to the traditional emphasis on intellectual history, one that rests on scepticism about the influence of tolerationist thought. This is ironic, insofar as historians in recent years have been increasingly persuaded of the potency of ideas and beliefs (especially religious beliefs).16 But for some recent historians, the ideological controversies over toleration are almost a sideshow, one that too often distracts attention from the main event. What really matters is the action on the ground, in local communities. Instead of focusing on the (allegedly) ineffectual and abstract theories of intellectual elites, we are advised to train our sights on the practical arrangements and compromises being made by ordinary people across Europe. There is no denying the vitality and importance of this new approach to the history of toleration. But if historians (on both sides of the divide) continue to play off ideas against practice, we lose the chance to develop a more integrated history. If the revisionist historiography remains stuck in polemical mode, it 16

See, for example, Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 2, “Taking Contemporary Belief Seriously”.

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will simply run parallel to the traditional scholarship and fail to do justice to its substantive achievements. Equally, if intellectual historians do not listen to the new social and cultural history, they will miss the opportunity for fruitful dialogue. For the history of toleration to progress beyond the current impasse, its practitioners will need to think hard about how their very different approaches relate to each other. Firstly, we need to give more attention to defining our subject area. Traditionally, historians of toleration marked out their territory with admirable clarity—they were focused on the state and its policy towards religious dissent, and on the great early modern controversy over the power of the magistrate in matters of religion.17 Of course, related issues had to be taken into consideration, but the state’s policy towards religious dissent (and rival claims about it) remained at the centre of the enquiry. The recent toleration literature, as we have seen, is much more ambitious, but also more fragmented and ambivalent. The agents of (in)tolerance are not only magistrates, but also crowds and neighbours. The objects of (in)tolerance range from heretics to sexual libertines or political dissidents. And intolerance can entail anything from gruesome execution to endogamy, verbal abuse or even forceful polemic. While this makes for a much richer picture of post-Reformation society, it also stretches the subject area well beyond what early moderns typically meant when they talked of toleration. And particularly when it moves beyond religion, it starts to look like nothing less than a history of how human beings deal with difference. That may be a great subject, but it is also a vast one, and historians who work on this new history of toleration are likely to spend much time talking at cross-purposes. The scholar who focuses on the state’s policy towards religious minorities is going to tell a different story with a different chronology than the historian who works on the experience of religious coexistence at the local level. And neither story will look much like the tale told by a historian writing about the regulation of sexual activity. Grouping these disparate topics together under “the history of toleration” could be a recipe for confusion. It becomes all the more important to clarify what we mean by toleration and what our subjects meant by it. Early modern writers often distinguished sharply between the civil (in)tolerance of the magistrate and the ecclesiastical (in)tolerance of the church; we could add the social (in)tolerance of the local community and the rhetorical (in)tolerance displayed in verbal or written exchanges. Without making distinctions like this we end up with inconclusive arguments between historians who are employing different criteria to assess whether someone was “tolerant” or “intolerant”. Milton proposed a

17

See, for example, the classic work by the Jesuit scholar Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1960).


fairly wide-ranging civil tolerance of religious diversity, as well as ecclesiastical tolerance of doctrinal diversity, but he showed relatively little interest in social tolerance and was noted for his violent rhetoric. In assessing him we need to specify what kind of tolerance we have in mind. While Milton and Toleration tries to make a virtue of imprecision, it would have been strengthened by a firmer conceptual framework. As things stand, several of its contributors seem unaware of the fact that they are not writing about “toleration” as it was understood by Milton himself. Marshall, by contrast, takes great care to unpack the concepts employed by his writers. Indeed, his book is a model of how we should distinguish between our own imported categories (which he often places within inverted commas) and those of our subjects. And it reminds us that if we attend closely to what early moderns meant by “toleration”, we will be forced to reckon with the role of rulers and magistrates in regulating religious practice and belief. Indeed one could argue that this ought to remain at the heart of our discussions of the problem of toleration, for the simple reason that it was at the heart of early modern discussions. Other approaches are both valid and valuable, but they should not displace this traditional concern. Secondly, however, intellectual historians of toleration should forge connections with the new history by exploring the social and geographical context of tolerationist writers. Judith Pollman has asked whether the practice of coexistence was “the catalyst for new ideas on religious uniformity”, and whether “the everyday experience of living with pluralism” caused “an intellectual orientation away from the Augustinian imperative compelle intrare”.18 These are questions worth addressing. Milton was a Londoner, but none of the essays in Milton and Toleration involves a sustained investigation of the religious diversity of Milton’s London, or the way it impacted his thought, though Tom Corns nicely juxtaposes Winthrop’s “city on a hill” with Milton’s “city of refuge”. John Marshall does address the practice of tolerance in Dutch cities, and he has valuable asides on his authors’ personal experience of pluralism, persecution and toleration. But it is perhaps telling that his index is devoid of place names. There remains some truth in the accusation that intellectual historians are prone to abstract their subjects from their social and geographical location. Placing writers in their local as well as their ideological contexts will help to build bridges between the intellectual and the social history of toleration. A final way in which intellectual historians can address the concerns of their critics is by exploring the reception and use of tolerationist classics. Neither of the books under review has much to say about the impact of Milton and Locke, though there are some intriguing comments on how Milton was read by

18

Judith Pollman, “Getting along”, History Workshop Journal 64 (2007), 423.

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Pufendorf, Barbeyrac and Bayle, and a fascinating chapter by Gerald Maclean on the reception of Paradise Lost among Arab-Islamic critics. Yet we cannot get the full measure of Milton and Locke’s significance until we trace the reception of their tolerationist writings through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some work has been done in this direction.19 We know that when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a piece of legislation that would disestablish the Episcopal Church, he drew on Milton’s anti-prelatical tracts and Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration. But countless other (less-celebrated) people pored over the tolerationist writings of Milton and Locke. Historians who are sceptical about the significance of tolerationist thinkers will not be impressed by yet another exposition of their ideas (though that is hardly an argument for a moratorium on this important and exacting task). But we do need new studies of the readers who consumed texts like Areopagitica and A Letter concerning Toleration. The story of the posthumous triumph of Milton and Locke remains to be told.

19

See, for example, Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 vols., vol. 5, The Church, Dissent and Religious Toleration, 1689–1773 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999); Alan Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Theologians (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), esp. chap. 5.