ABSTRACT
The history, as have other recent histories of the period, left the sixteenth century with a surfeit of cultural goods. The larger environment in which this cultural explosion was going forward in the seventeenth century looked no more propitious to the distribution and ordering of this torrent of cultural goods than had part of the sixteenth century. Whatever the distraught character of the European continent, harbored off to the west was an island which had had, by and large, minimal recent impact on its neighbors—England. The hypotheses flowing from the presses of scholarly publishers were rooted, at least in part, in and motivated by the foundational hypotheses of Gnosticism, mysticism, and millenarianism. The immediate consequence of the idea of religious toleration was to put an end to the routinely disfiguring and disquieting cultural spectacle of continued religious conflict.
