Charitable Hatred

This book offers a new thematic overview of sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious history, focusing on the history of religious dissent and its treatment. It treats dissenting groups comparatively rather than separately (this denominational approach has dominated), and avoids distorting linear models of progress 'from persecution to toleration' which have hitherto dominated the historiography. It weaves together different approaches to the topic and forges an original link between them: intellectual, legal, political, ecclesiastical, social cultural.