The natural habitat of intellectual history

The history of tolerance and toleration is one of the last preserves still firmly in the grasp of the intellectual historians. In their saga the sixteenth century plays a pivotal role, and in their ranks the Protestant Reformation was long the uncontested avant-garde, battling for individual liberty and public tolerance. When the Jesuit scholar Joseph Lecler published his impressive and widely hailed Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme in 1955, the confession of some key players had changed but the perimeters of the intellectual playing field remained fixed. His saga has a new beginning and a fresh ending: the curve of progress is now traced from the scholastic debate about the rights of the erring conscience to the climate of toleration in Catholic Poland. Notwithstanding his awareness of the importance of political realities, Lecler concentrated on tracts and treatises, on publishers and printers. The ensuing critique of Lecler refocused on the creative triangle Basle–London–Amsterdam and turned with vigour to the new climate of scepticism emerging in the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth. However, as in the case of Lecler and his predecessors, the debate continued to be a discourse in intellectual history.

In the English-speaking world, Henry Kamen raised his independent voice. Though granting that the Reformation brought greater religious liberty, he insisted that it did so ‘despite the reformers’ and merely ‘as a concomitant of free trade’. This intriguing observation evolves into a general thesis: in Protestant countries ‘toleration tended to increase in proportion to the decrease of dogmatic belief’.