Toleration in Enlightenment Europe

The Enlightenment is often seen as the great age of religious and intellectual toleration, and this volume is the first systematic European survey of the theory, practice, and very real limits to toleration in eighteenth century Europe. A distinguished international team of contributors demonstrate how the publicists of the European Enlightenment developed earlier ideas about toleration, gradually widening the desire for religious toleration into a philosophy of freedom seen as a fundamental attribute and a precondition for a civilised society. Nonetheless Europe never uniformly or comprehensively embraced toleration during the eighteenth century: although religious toleration was central to the Enlightenment project, advances in toleration were often fragile and short-lived.