Getting Along

I believe it was the late Bob Scribner who once compared historians to people shipwrecked: working on a new project they feel themselves to be floating around on a solitary piece of driftwood, in the end to be stranded on the same shore as many others. Reading the introduction of Alexandra Walsham's stimulating and impressive Charitable Hatred, I was reminded of the concerns voiced in the opening pages of Keith Luria's Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in early modern France (2005), as well as in Benjamin Kaplan's forthcoming book Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in early modern Europe (2007), that I was privileged to read in manuscript. Like Kaplan and Luria, Walsham rejects the notion of an early modern 'rise of toleration' – a linear development towards modern religious freedom – and believes that the time has come to rethink early modern attitudes to religious dissent.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to write the history of toleration primarily involved exploring the ideas of 'enlightened' thinkers, mostly Protestants, whose efforts had cumulated in the discovery of the Western concept of religious freedom.¹ The story of intolerance, in so far as it was told at all, focused less on mapping the internal logic of the violent suppression of dissent than on tracking the popular 'hysteria', 'superstition' and 'inner demons' that occasionally held Europe in their grip.² Yet by the late 1970s, many argued that such narratives told only half the story: not only should intolerance not be dismissed as hysteria, but any viable history of toleration should also explore how ideas developed on the ground. In the 1990s such voices intensified. A seminal collection of essays that Ole Grell and Bob Scribner edited in 1996 challenged both the idea of a linear development and the notion that the history of toleration could be written as a history of ideas and legislation.³ There were a range of issues that the traditional narrative had not been able to resolve. First, the relationship between the theory and practice of toleration in early modern Europe was hardly straightforward. On the one hand, even where legislation or theoretical justifications for toleration were lacking, religious coexistence on the ground could often be surprisingly lasting and successful.⁴ On the other, the legislative frameworks that allowed for different religions to be practised were often the result of pragmatic considerations rather than high-minded principle; such arrangements were thought of as second-best, temporary and reversible solutions for the deplorable phenomenon of religious pluralism.⁵ The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was only the most notorious of many reversals: in many parts of Europe the eighteenth century saw an increase in state violence towards dissenters.⁶ Such violence and the ideas behind it turn out to be much more intellectually coherent than has often been assumed.⁷

Secondly, scholars in the 1990s asked new questions about the effect of the sixteenth-century Reformations. Even if medieval Europe had already developed into a 'persecuting society', as R. I. Moore had argued in 1987, the problem of religious coexistence became especially pressing after the Reformation. Whereas some argue that intolerance was the inevitable concomitant of 'confessionalization', others suggested that a well-developed sense of confessional allegiance could be more conducive to peaceable coexistence than indifference to religious distinctions.⁸ Finally, questions were being asked about the role of the state. Regardless of what had happened to the rights of religious dissidents, in the wake of Foucault some scholars noted that when religious deviance became more respectable, other forms of social deviance might be criminalized. Rather than acting as a signpost to a world of individual rights and personal freedom, toleration of religious dissent could go hand in hand with a tightening of other cultural codes.⁹ Simultaneously, states were not persecuting dissenters at any cost. Princes might be proactive in enforcing religious uniformity, but political expediency could also dictate inaction. Famously, the Electors...