Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (review)

Walsham's first book, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993), made a persuasive and subtle case for taking post-Reformation polemic seriously, but not too seriously. Walsham insisted that social and religious life was much more complicated than the stark polarities exhibited in polemical writing might indicate. At the same time, she went on to reclaim "church papist"—a term of opprobrium used by the hotter sort of Protestant to denigrate those who were deemed insufficiently reformed—as evidence of a wide swathe of opinion, a moderate middle that remained loyal to some traditional practices and beliefs while conforming to the mandates of the Elizabethan church. "Church papists" turned out to exemplify the hybrid faith that is now seen as typical of post-Reformation England. A similar irenic urge is visible in her second book, Providence in Early Modern England (1999), which makes the point, in extensive detail, that providence was not the proprietary interest of Protestants but part of the common stock of European Christianity.

Charitable Hatred is a logical extension of Walsham's earlier work. The desire to penetrate the veil of polemical misrepresentation and to stress commonalities over differences are both prominent in this careful account of what for too long has been treated as the rise of toleration. Walsham, like most historians of her generation, has a reflexive hostility toward anything smacking of a Whig interpretation of history. Indeed, her account is resistant to narrative in general—rather than trace a chronological sequence, the book is arranged in thematic chapters—and it presents a picture of the period from 1500 to 1700 that is dynamic but does not prominently feature long-term trends. The central claim is that tolerance and intolerance exist in a dialectical or symbiotic relationship. The subtle complexity of the exposition is commendable, and the wealth of detail will impress anyone with an interest in early modern England. Walsham is sympathetic to both persecutor and persecuted; she notes the ways in which arguments for toleration were often shaped by political considerations and consequently shifted when political circumstances changed; she also observes that political toleration often had the unintended consequence of reinforcing confessional identities as religious minorities sought to preserve their distinctiveness against the threat of assimilation.

By patiently historicizing tolerance and intolerance, Walsham gives her readers a ready sense of the intricate density of early modern religious culture. However, by depicting the post-Reformation period in terms of constant interplay between the imperatives to love and to correct, Walsham's account defers significant change until the eighteenth century and later. The Augustinian ideology of persecution is said to hold sway throughout the period under discussion; and it is only later, when secularization has worked its rough magic, that a discernibly modern form of toleration emerges. If this account is true, it suggests that the prospects for tolerance in a postsecular age are dim.