ABSTRACT
The influential arguments of John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) dominate scholarship on the history of religious toleration. Literary studies, however, can offer a fuller understanding of its motives, practices, limits, and possibilities. Especially insightful work is focusing on the affects of toleration, the transformation of “religion” into tolerant forms, the dialectical relationship between tolerant religion and the state, and how toleration is imagined globally. By illuminating both the creative power of texts and their place in discursive networks, literary analyses can reveal how religious toleration contributes to and functions within larger spiritual, ethical, and political constellations.
