Professor Ben Kaplan – UCL History

The history of religious toleration is often told as a story of the rise of modern freedom of religion. But in Europe in the centuries between the Reformation and French Revolution, people of different faiths managed to live together peacefully in the same towns and villages only by means of some very peculiar arrangements and accommodations. In this lecture, with the aid of visual materials, we explore two particular arrangements - the clandestine church and the shared church. As they show, toleration in early modern Europe took forms that bear little resemblance to modern ones, or to one another.