Product Description: In today’s developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace...read more

Product Description: In recent decades, historians of early-modern European political thought have tended to neglect the concept of monarchy and monarchism, focusing instead on the development of republicanism during this period. Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment aims to correct this imbalance by illustrating that many thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in fact, saw monarchy as a solution to the instability, chaos, and even violence of experiments with republican government...read more

Reminiscent of More s Utopia and Swift s Gulliver s Travels, Denis Veiras s History of the Sevarambians is one of the great utopian novels of the seventeenth century. Set in Australia, this rollicking adventure story comes complete with a shipwreck, romantic tales, religious fraud, magical talismans, and supernatural animals. The current volume contains two versions of Veiras s story: the original English and the 1738 English translation of the expanded French version. Veiras s work was well known in its own time and has been translated into a number of languages, including German, French, Russian, and Japanese, while the English version has been largely forgotten. The book has been read to teach a variety of political doctrines, and also has been cited as an early development in the history of ideas about religious toleration. It reveals a great deal about early modern English, Dutch, and French attitudes toward other cultures. One of the first utopian writings to qualify as a novel, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for human life, in all its complexity and ambiguity."

Product Description: This volume contains English translations of two important early French and German defences of freedom of the press. Almost unknown in the English-speaking world, these texts demonstrate that freedom of the press was an important issue in other parts of Europe in the early modern period, giving rise to articulate theories...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Toleration of differing religious ideas exists in parts of the contemporary world, but it is still not clear how this came about. Recent work has uncovered the enormous importance one branch of historiography has had in bringing about such tolerance as we have: histories of heresy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first book to bring together studies of a wide variety of millenarians who were active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and eastern Europe. The sheer variety of millenarian ideas and movements and their myriad of ebbs and flows and interactions teach us that millenarianism was a much more complex and influential factor than most studies have recognized...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Wider attention to Carl Friedrich Bahrdt should revise the standard picture of eighteenth-century Germany. German writers were often reported to be apolitical. Historians often claim that the Germans developed a more radical politics in response to the French Revolution...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Delving into rich but little-known sources, Religious Toleration combats the standard understanding of toleration as a development of the modern West by demonstrating its occurrence in ancient Persia and China, medieval Europe, colonial Latin America, and Europe before the Enlightenment...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to a large diaspora of French Huguenots, known as the "Refuge." Spreading throughout Europe, many of these Huguenots used their literary and polemical talents in the development of political ideas that would help them in their efforts to return to France, or in their adjustment to living outside of France...read more

Product Description: This innovative collection points to the need for a reevaluation of the origins of toleration theory. Philosophers, intellectual historians, and political theorists have assumed that the development of the theory of toleration has been a product of the modern world, and John Locke is usually regarded as the first theorist of toleration...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book brings out the profound influence of the tradition of philosophical skepticism on political thought. It shows that many of the root ideas of liberalism in early modern thought were a product of engagement with the skeptical tradition...read more