This volume of essays offers a new interpretation of the role of tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation. It questions the traditional view, which has claimed a progressive development towards greater religious toleration from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. Instead, it places incidents of religious tolerance and intolerance in their specific social and political context.

Fifteen leading scholars present a comprehensive examination of this subject in all the regions of Europe which 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.