Narratives of progress are both seductive and misleading. By stressing the differences between the past and the present, they prevent us from seeing deeper similarities and so make it harder to understand the relevance of history for our own day. The familiar narrative of the movement from medieval intolerance to Enlightenment tolerance is a case in point. Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries struggled to find ways to live with those they disagreed with religiously, and their responses to the tensions created by religious diversity varied enormously.
The modern understanding of toleration as accepting and even embracing diversity creates another barrier to understanding early modern toleration. The difficulties inherent in a policy of toleration become apparent if we start from the principle that dissent of any kind is a refusal to accept authority, whether that authority is political, religious, or cultural. Toleration then becomes the willingness of those in authority not to use physical or legal coercion to eliminate dissent. It can also be the willingness of those without authority to forgo the use of violence to enforce religious or cultural norms.1 When dissent concerns minor or unimportant issues, toleration is easy, but when it rejects the power of those in authority or questions deeply held beliefs and practices, toleration becomes much more problematic. Religious dissent in early modern Europe challenged the authority not only of the clergy but also of political rulers who claimed responsibility for their subjects’ spiritual well-being, and it undermined fundamental elements of a culture shaped by specific religious beliefs and practices. It is no wonder, then, that toleration was such a contentious issue.
The medieval concept of toleration involved forbearance, the self-restraint of those in authority toward perceived evil, especially where the result of acting against that evil might inflict more harm than it would prevent. Heresy or religious dissent, however, was such a great evil that it could not be tolerated.2 Andrew Pettegree has called early modern toleration a “loser’s creed” used by religious minorities to justify their right to exist but abandoned once that minority became the dominant elite.3 In other words, the experience of persecution did not necessarily make a religious group more willing to tolerate dissent from its own understanding of truth. Under these circumstances, toleration as acceptance of religious dissent could only become established when that dissent was no longer seen as endangering religious truth, challenging political authority, or undermining cultural norms.
This change occurred in different ways and to different degrees and at different times in different places. The cases described in this volume demonstrate how difficult it is to make generalizations about toleration in the early modern period. Toleration was not one-dimensional: it had religious, political, economic, and social aspects. It was justified by a combination of theological, philosophical, legal, and pragmatic arguments, but it could also have a political purpose, as Antwerp’s defense of religious dissenters and New Christians demonstrates. It could also be based on experience—whether positive, as in the justifications for toleration used by Dutch Mennonites; or negative, as in the complaints concerning procedural abuses and torture in the Bamberg witch trials. The particular form of toleration differed significantly according to local circumstances. In the early seventeenth century, Anabaptists were tolerated in the Dutch Republic and allowed to exist in return for paying “protection money” in Emden, but they faced growing persecution in the Swiss Confederation. Nor was toleration unidirectional, for communities could become less tolerant as well as more tolerant, as shown by developments in Antwerp over the sixteenth century and the convent and parish of Welver in the later seventeenth century.
Despite this diversity, it is possible to draw some more general conclusions about the practice of toleration in central and northwestern Europe in the two centuries after the Reformation. First and foremost is the importance of the particular configuration of political and legal authority. The extent of toleration could become an issue used by competing political authorities to increase their own power, as was the case with Bern and Fribourg in the Common Territories of Orbe and Grandson. It could also be a factor when city governments tried to assert their autonomy under a ruling sovereign, as with Antwerp under Charles V or Emden under the counts of East Frisia. Where it had no rivals, a sovereign government could adopt and enforce more uniform confessional standards at will, whether that meant eliminating Anabaptists in Zurich or persecuting Huguenots in the Artois region. Once they decided to impose Tridentine standards of clerical discipline, the prince-bishops of Münster, as both secular and ecclesiastical rulers, could take action against concubinary priests in Westphalia, and resistance even by noble canons was ineffective. The legal framework established by the Peace of Westphalia set the parameters for conflicts between pastors of rival churches in Hesse and between the abbess of Welver and the Protestant parishioners of the village, but it also allowed Lutherans in Augsburg to worship in their own churches.
The example of the Augsburg Lutherans also shows the close association between place and the formation of religious identity. Corporate worship is held in a particular public space, and so churches became the center point of confessional rivalry. The yearly Friedensfest celebrated by Augsburg’s Lutherans in their own churches enabled them to maintain and even to strengthen their corporate identity as their numbers declined. The rapid growth of Emden meant that religious refugees were clustered in the suburbs, and the inclusion of Jewish residences within the new city walls was significant not only for practical but also for symbolic reasons. The importance of place for maintaining religious identity was also reflected in popular religious literature. In the Dialogues Rustiques, new converts to the Reformed religion were encouraged to leave the Catholic “wilderness” of the Artois, where they could only practice their new faith in private, and to settle in the Netherlands, where there was a visible community of coreligionists.
Space could also give rise to conflict, and the clergy were sometimes its chief instigators. In the Common Territories of western Switzerland during the 1530s and 1540s, attempts to regulate access to church space were unsuccessful, leading only to deliberate provocation by Reformed preachers, active resistance by the Catholic populace, and the failure of biconfessionalism. Long-term biconfessionalism was largely the product of stalemate. The de facto biconfessionalism established in Welver during the century between the Peace of Augsburg and the Peace of Westphalia reflected a situation where both parties were of roughly equal strength and neither could force its claims to the convent church on the other. Significantly, the changes only occurred when the balance of power was tilted by intervention from outside. In Hesse the Peace of Westphalia ended the parish pastor’s monopoly on providing religious services to those within a geographically defined parish. The result was rivalry and conflict as pastors of the confessional church that had been dominant fought to maintain its traditional rights and privileges against clergy of a rival confession.
The attempts of Antwerp’s government to defend the city’s New Christians suggests that trying to determine whether toleration developed first from ideological justification or on the basis of practical experience is a fruitless exercise, like the proverbial question of the chicken and the egg. In fact, the two could develop together. It is striking, though, that arguments for religious toleration were associated with the places that had the greatest religious diversity. In Emden and in the Dutch Republic, the daily experience of religious coexistence and the ideological justification for toleration went hand in hand, even though clergymen might rail against their theological opponents. At the other end of the spectrum, persecution of religious minorities was strongest in monoconfessional areas such as Catholic France and Reformed Switzerland. The use of similar arguments against the witch trials by theologians and the family and friends of those accused of witchcraft shows the extent that learned and popular culture shared broader cultural attitudes.
Last but not least, the studies in this volume demonstrate that in order to understand early modern toleration, we cannot limit our attention to the philosophical and legal treatises used by earlier generations of historians and focus only on providing broad narratives about an abstract concept. The authors have drawn on records from civil court cases and ecclesiastical disciplinary procedures, popular literary works, commemorative images, and city maps. Like pieces of a mosaic, their studies contribute to the bigger picture of the varied responses to religious pluralism in the early modern period. The initial challenge to a dominant understanding of Christianity upset an equilibrium, and the immediate result was tension and turmoil at the local level, whether as caused by evangelical preaching in western Switzerland in the early Reformation or as an outgrowth of the Peace of Westphalia in Hesse after 1648. It took time to work out a new equilibrium, and that process could include significant conflict according to the specific local circumstances. The full scope of the process of toleration can only be appreciated if we take into account the communal and regional situation as well as the broader social and cultural forces that are revealed in the wide range of both published and unpublished sources generated by the individuals and groups involved.
Western society is no longer torn by rival claims to authority between different forms of Christianity, but other religious traditions can raise similar questions of how to deal with fundamental differences of belief at the local level. The early twenty-first century has also witnessed sharp disagreements over both political policy and cultural norms. Rather than glibly asserting that “we should all just get along,” perhaps we can learn something about the costs and benefits of toleration from those who struggled to define its extent in early modern Europe.
Bibliography
Bejczy, István. “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept.” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 365–384.
Davis, Natalie Z. “Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” In Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, 152–188. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.
Pettegree, Andrew. “The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620.” In Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, 182–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
For a discussion of how popular violence could be an expression of anger at the failure of authorities to eliminate dissent, see Natalie Z. Davis, “Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 152–88.
István Bejczy, “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1997): 365–84.
Andrew Pettegree, “The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182–98.