This volume offers a re-interpretation of the role of tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation. It questions the traditional notion of a progressive development towards greater religious toleration from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards. Instead, it places incidents of religious tolerance and intolerance in their specific social and political contexts. Fifteen leading scholars offer a comprehensive interpretation of this subject, covering all the regions of Europe that were directly affected by the Reformation in the crucial period between 1500, when northern humanism had begun to make an impact, and 1648, the end of the Thirty Years War. In this way, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation provides a dramatically different view of how religious toleration and conflict developed in early modern Europe. - excerpt is TOC and full Intro including ftnts - downloaded via iPhone to DBOX

Martin Mulsow’s seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. Mulsow shows that even in the late17thC some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. -- November release date

Stephen David Snobelen is Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology at University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a founder member of the Newton project and author of many fascinating papers on Newton's alchemy and religious thinking. I was privileged to be able to ask him some questions about his work on Newton. -- helpful re the process by which Newton's papers were hidden, then sold at auction in 1936 and beginning in 1991 being made available for researchers as the dispersed manuscripts have been re-collected - who is working on what issues, as of 2005 -- Snobelen got his degrees in History of Philosophy of Science at Cambridge with Schaffer -- converted page and downloaded pdf to Note

Ulrich Lehner, Marquette University -- Published version. "Trinitarian Thought in the Early Modern Era" in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity. Eds. Gilles Emery, and Matthew Levering. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: 240-253. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199557813.001.0001. Copyright © 2011 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Used with permission. -- This article explores Catholic and Protestant Trinitarian theology from 1550 to 1770. It discusses various issues, from the mystical visions of Ignatius of Loyola to the Augustinian approach of Jonathan Edwards. It considers the growing variety of eclectic views and the influence of anti-Trinitarian thinkers, beginning with Michael Servetus and Faustus Socinus. It also highlights the rise of confessionalism and anti-Trinitarianism and the explosion of mystical theology during this period. -- downloaded pdf to Note

In classical and contemporary sociology, key elements of liberal-democratic ideology are seen as secular extensions of Protestant ideas. This case study provides a different analysis that emphasizes the problem of religious conflict and radicalism in early liberal-democratic ideology. Proponents of the new ideology rejected key tenets of their Puritan heritage, adopting deistic beliefs that legitimated pluralism and tolerance and opposed the older Puritan ideal of godly politics. Building on recent work in the sociology of culture, the paper outlines an analytic strategy for explaining change in ideological systems. Ideological change emerges out of the interaction of contextual pressures and intellectual precedents, as a collective response by ideological innovators to problems of authority. The analysis in this study shows how historical events can form an episodic context which structures this problem of authority. -- downloaded pdf to Note

The Socinian controversy discuss'd in six dialogues: wherein the chief of the Socinian tracts publish'd of late years are consider'd. To which is added, a defence of the first and last dialogues relating to the satisfaction of Jesus Christ

JSTOR: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1978), pp. 233-250 -- downloaded pdf to Note

JSTOR: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Apr., 2009), pp. 191-211 -- downloaded pdf to Note