This chapter offers an analysis of toleration as legal practice and administrative discretion, which finds its origins in canon law. This chapter articulates common frames of reference to toleration: a qualification of evil, the preservation of outward unity and social trust, economic benefit, and the duty to protect public peace and order – all interests that could inform a particular decision on whether to tolerate certain practices. Toleration entailed a spectrum of practices of coexistence, which may be characterised as incorporation through marginalisation. This marginalisation commonly had a spatial aspect. The visibility of minority religiosity tended to be constrained through practices of segregation or specific rules about the expression of identity in public. Moreover, toleration was intended to be temporary, and often appeared to be tentative, and legally fragile.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

This chapter offers an in-depth reflection on the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time-shaped Christian imagining of the other as “becoming” and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity. It is vital to the “emancipation” of modern constitutionalism from toleration that the constitution does not require a dominant or exclusive set of temporalities to establish order. Rather, constitutions need to allow for citizens to keep time differently, for example through the protection of rights and freedoms.

This chapter explores the impact of the Reformation on Jewish–Christian relations and the Protestant return to Hebrew Scripture. Documents show the beginnings of modernity and its offspring: toleration, emancipation and antisemitism.

Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

Rousseau’s chapter “Of Civil Religion” has perplexed readers ever since the publication of the Social Contract. For the book’s earliest readers, the chapter was a sign of its author’s theological heresy even if contemporary readers are likely to take a more benign view of Rousseau’s intention. The question I pose is why the formula for the laws and institutions set out in the earlier parts of the Social Contract requires additional support in the form of the religious beliefs examined in the penultimate chapter. I want to suggest that this chapter represents a nod in the direction of Rousseau’s political realism in his acknowledgement that civil religion remains an indispensable part of the education of republican citizens.

John Milton argues that liberty of conscience requires the freedom to express one’s innermost commitments to others, specifically in speech and writing. Hypocritical conformity robs individuals of crucial opportunities to foster political capacities of citizenship, specifically the skill of independent judgment. Milton hints at an intuition that other early modern figures will later foreground – that hypocritical conformity to the state religion hardens dissenters and makes them incapable of being judicious political citizens. If individuals live in a political society that does not afford them liberty of conscience, they will slowly lose the capability to exercise their conscience over time. This freedom requires a robust view of freedom and agency in the public sphere, since it implies far more than an inward freedom of conviction. Conscience must be cultivated independently of political and ecclesiastical authorities and requires confrontation with other individuals in the public sphere, implying the open exchange of ideas and the freedom to express one’s ideas publicly in writing or speech. Milton insists that the circulation of ideas in print allows for an extended opportunity for individuals to exercise their conscience, as the written word persists over time longer than speech, which dissipates in the immediate moment, only to be recounted by witnesses. Liberty of conscience is so crucial to Milton’s understanding of freedom that he describes it as the highest liberty above all liberties, even justifying other political freedoms.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

The Conclusion first assesses whether there is a unified history of religious toleration in colonial America to be told. There is not because the colonies were all too different. Next, the Conclusion discusses what the sum of the individual chapters of the book, by focusing on law, contributes to the historiography of colonial America. As this book has endeavored to demonstrate, important lessons about history—including about religious history—can be learned by spotlighting law, just as they can by concentrating on economics, politics, and the like.

Religious liberty is a core component of America’s legal culture. William Penn, the Quaker founder and proprietor of colonial Pennsylvania, played an indispensable role in ensuring that it is. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson—the author of one of the most celebrated religious liberty laws in American history, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786—described Penn as “the greatest lawgiver the world has produced, the first in either antient or modern times who has laid the foundation of govmt in the pure and unadulterated principles of peace of reason and right.” Jefferson was correct. After all, the commitment to liberty of conscience that characterized colonial Pennsylvania traced directly to Penn’s vision, example, and determination: Pennsylvania enacted more laws about religious tolerance than any other British American colony, both before and after Penn’s death. Delaware, which Penn also owned and which constituted the “lower counties” of Pennsylvania until it became an independent state in 1776, likewise enacted religiously tolerant laws even when Penn permitted it to govern itself with a separate assembly after 1704.

England promulgated more laws of significance about religion than any nation in the Early Modern period in large part because of England’s break from the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII and the inconsistent relationship that Henry VIII’s successors had with that church. The colonies chronicled in this book were planted primarily by English persons with an aversion to English laws that adversely impacted their religious beliefs and practices. Given the book’s emphasis on law, it is appropriate to provide a brief history of the English laws from which the planters of colonial America were fleeing. The Introduction sets the stage for the chapters about colonial America that follow.

The first part of this chapter explores the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony’s conception of law on matters of religion. For the Pilgrims, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for sustaining a sanctified society. The second part of the chapter details how the legislature and the courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted many statutes and issued scores of judicial decisions to help ensure the success of their Puritan “Citty vpon a Hill.” In 1691 Massachusetts Bay was issued a new charter as a royal colony. The 1691 provincial charter required that “liberty of Conscience” be allowed “in the Worshipp of God to all Christians (Except Papists).” The third part of the chapter focuses on the laws enacted and adjudicated during the provincial period to determine whether Massachusetts Bay complied with the new charter’s requirement about religious toleration. Massachusetts Bay’s Puritan Standing Order—the unofficial alliance between Congregational ministers and godly magistrates—would not abandon the animating principle of Puritan Congregationalism without a fight, and that fight was waged in large part through statutes and court cases. It was not until 1833 that Massachusetts disestablished church and state.

At present, the writing of early American legal history tends to be dominated by cultural and social approaches. This chapter is an exegesis in intellectual legal history. Part I chronicles how central religious freedom always was in the organic laws—the town compacts, the patent of 1643/4, the charter of 1663—of colonial Rhode Island. Part II describes whether the laws enacted pursuant to those organic laws were consistent with that animating principle. Part III assesses the tensions identified in Parts I and II.

Montesquieu famously concluded in The Spirit of the Laws that each form of government has an animating principle—a set of “human passions that set it in motion”—and that each form can be corrupted if its animating principle is undermined. Maryland is a compelling case study of Montesquieu’s theory: founded in 1632 by Lord Baltimore as a haven for Catholics, a mere two decades later that animating principle was dead. This chapter explores why. Specifically, the chapter examines the birth, death, and resurrection of Maryland’s animating principle by identifying with as much precision as possible the impact of the law itself on regime change in colonial Maryland.

This chapter explores the relationship between the animating principle of colonial Connecticut—Puritan Congregationalism—and the colony’s laws. Part I chronicles how central Puritan Congregationalism was in the organic law, statutory law, and common law of the River Colony at which Connecticut was originally planted. Part II investigates the law of the New Haven Colony, a separate community settled in 1638 that joined with the River Colony in 1665 to create a unified Connecticut Colony. Part III examines the law of the unified Connecticut Colony and endeavors to discern when Connecticut’s laws began to deviate from Puritan Congregationalism. Part IV concludes the chapter by assessing the events that led to the official demise in the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 of Puritan Congregationalism as the animating principle of Connecticut. As will be seen, the law of colonial Connecticut eventually came to reflect the idea of religious toleration sweeping, albeit unevenly and imperfectly, across the larger Atlantic World.

This conclusion summarises the findings of the previous chapters and takes a global view on the relationships among early modern drama, religious dissimulation, and toleration. Rather than linking the theatre as an institution to one particular religio-political position on the issue of religious dissimulation, this conclusion emphasises the flexibility of the medium and the genuine religious diversity that it could express even on the commercial stage. In contrast to earlier research on toleration in early modern drama, however, this conclusion further argues that the theatre’s complicity in ideologies of persecution was in many cases more pronounced than has been previously recognised, for example by questioning whether comedy and its inclusive impetus imply per se a tolerant stance. Nonetheless, the stage could arguably also exploit the theatrical potential of religious dissimulation for the purpose of entertainment, as is evident, for instance, in the hypocrisy of the stage Puritan, and thereby trivialise the spectre of the secret dissenter and defuse religious tensions to some extent.

This chapter offers a survey of religious dissimulation in early modern England, where questions concerning its legitimacy were, owing to the unpredictable course of the English Reformation(s), arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Europe. While most Catholic and Protestant theological authorities condemned dissimulation in principle, the practice must have been widespread and was perceived, at least by those in power, as a political reality that could not simply be ignored. This chapter outlines both ecclesiological and political justifications for tolerating those who dissembled their faith and argues that their ambivalent status and the often unstable practices of policing such religious dissimulation should be considered a central aspect of early modern approaches to the problem of religious toleration. Religious dissimulation was a highly controversial practice, and toleration for inward dissent was never a given. Especially in times of political crisis, church and state authorities frequently resorted to aggressive measures to access the secret beliefs of religious dissenters, which belied the Queen’s alleged refusal to make windows into men’s hearts.

This Introduction discusses why dissembling one’s faith in order to avoid religious persecution was, despite its ubiquity, such a contentious practice for the early moderns and how the controversies surrounding such dissimulation were informed by early modern views on lying. It further provides an account of the various points of contact between debates on the legitimacy of religious dissimulation and theatrical dissimulation, respectively, both of which were indebted to shared theological concerns. Plays that stage religious dissimulation as their subject matter are therefore also legible as meta-theatrical reflections on the political and religious implications of their medium. Finally, this Introduction provides an overview of scholarship on the early modern stage and its position vis-à-vis contemporary debates on conformity and nonconformity, which has frequently been thematised in the supposedly antagonistic relationship between the theatre and the Puritans. Arguably, however, the relationship between the stage and various contemporary positions on the question of religious dissimulation was more dynamic and unstable than previous scholarship has often suggested.