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Pragmatic Toleration: The Politics of Religious Heterodoxy in Early Reformation Antwerp, 1515-1555
Contributor(s): Christman, Victoria (Author)

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ISBN: 1580465161     ISBN-13: 9781580465168
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
OUR PRICE: $128.25  

Binding Type: Hardcover
Published: April 2015
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Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | Western Europe - General
- Religion | Christianity - History
- Religion | History
Dewey: 274.932
LCCN: 2015004139
Series: Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe
Physical Information: 0.75" H x 6" W x 9" L (1.20 lbs) 256 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Western Europe
- Religious Orientation - Christian
Features: Bibliography, Index
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
In a modern world still struggling to achieve religious coexistence, there has been a recent burgeoning of scholarship aimed at examining the history of such coexistence. Most of these studies focus on developments in the seventeenth century and beyond. This book redirects attention earlier, to the first half of the sixteenth century, and argues that impulses to toleration were already at work even amid the religious upheaval of the European Reformations.In the early modern metropolis of Antwerp, the author finds a wealthy merchant city struggling to balance the competing interests of municipality and empire. While their imperial overlords attempted to impose religious uniformityvia increasingly repressive anti-heresy edicts, the city fathers of Antwerp found ways to circumvent those laws in order to accommodate the religious heterodoxy of their most valued inhabitants. The result was the development of pragmatically tolerant practices that arose in the service of fundamentally nonreligious motivations.

Via a series of case studies, this book documents the development of such practices on the part of the Antwerp fathersas they defended their heterodox inhabitants. It seeks to understand the motivations underlying the councilors' lenient treatment of heterodoxy in their city, and attempts to answer the question of how we are to understand such pragmatically tolerant behavior as part of the broader history of religious tolerance in the Christian West.

Victoria Christman is associate professor of history at Luther College.
 
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