The sixteen chapters in this book, written by leading experts in this period's history, offer a new and dramatically different interpretation of how religious toleration and conflict developed in the crucial period between 1500, when northern humanism had begun to make an impact, and 1648, the end of the Thirty Years War. They question the traditional view of a general progression toward greater religious toleration, and instead place religious tolerance and intolerance in their specific social and political contexts.

1. Introduction Ole Peter Grell; 2. The travail of tolerance: containing chaos in Early Modern Europe Heiko A. Oberman; 3. Preconditions of tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth century Germany Bob Scribner; 4. Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520-1565 William Monter; 5. Un Roi, Une Loi, Deux Fois: parameters for the history of Catholic-Reformed co-existence in France, 1555-1685 Philip Benedict; 6. Confession, conscience, and honour: the limits of magisterial tolerance in sixteenth-century Strassburg Lorna Jane Abray; 7. One Reformation or many? Protestant identities in the Later Reformation in Germany Euan Cameron; 8. Toleration in the Early Swiss Reformation: the art and politics of Niklaus Manuel of Berne Bruce Gordon; 9. Tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Basle Hans R. Guggisberg; 10. Exile and tolerance Ole Peter Grell; 11. The politics of toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572-1620 Andrew Pettegree; 12. Archbishop Cranmer: concord and tolerance in a changing church Diarmaid MacCullogh; 13. Toleration for catholics in the Puritan Revolution Norah Carlin; 14. The question of tolerance in Bohemia and Moravia in the age of the Reformation Jaroslav Pánek; 15. Tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Hungary Katalin Péter; 16. Protestant confessionalization in the towns of Royal Prussia and the practice of religious toleration in Poland-Lithuania Michael G. Müller.