| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Perez Zagorin. How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 371. $29.95.

This work is true to its title: it is concerned exclusively with the idea, rather than the practice, of religious toleration, and nothing said or done east of Saxony (aside from one paragraph on the kingdom of Poland) appears in its pages. Perez Zagorin presents a decidedly whiggish interpretation of the rise and spread of theories of religious toleration in Western Europe and America from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Dismissing recent scholarship that suggests that ideas about toleration were already circulating in the Middle Ages, he instead locates its origins among certain thinkers of the Protestant Reformation, especially Sebastian Castellio. From there he follows a familiar narrative (first traced by Joseph Lecler in his magisterial Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme [1955]) through the writings of Dirck Coornhert, Hugo Grotius, Benedict Spinoza, the seventeenth-century English controversialists, John Locke, and Pierre Bayle. These thinkers, he argues, have given the modern West the idea of religious freedom, "one of [its] predominant and most cherished attributes" (p. 13). One may well wonder if this is still the case, given current discussions within some Western democracies about banning the wearing of Muslim head scarves in public spaces. It is clear, in any event, that Zagorin writes with the recent rise of radical Islam in mind.

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