ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about the constructive relationship among the world religions represent a universal issue. It deserves to be addressed in the beginning of a book on toleration and tolerance in pre-modern literature and culture. The book focuses on academic aspects in medieval and early modern literature, religion, and philosophy. The critical analysis of Lessing's highly challenging motif of the three rings will subsequently allow us to gain a good footing in the examination of the meaning of toleration and/or tolerance, even in earlier times. The book acknowledges and underscores its deeply political nature after all because when the literary and historical archives suddenly reveal how much efforts to establish toleration and perhaps also tolerance were pursued already in the past. It shows how then-modern, radicalized individuals could claim the European Middle Ages for their ideological agendas of racism and Islamophobia, for instance.