Thomasius on the toleration of heresy

Over two thousand years the Christian Church identified a wider range and a greater number of heresies than most other religions and, when secular authorities did not protected the heretics, took drastic measures to persuade the heretic to recant and to extirpate the false doctrine. Heresy, of course, is a word like a box [End Page 201] that at different times may hold many different ideas and so some articles are dealing with definitions and identifications that are not the same. The editors suggest that the articles show a profound change in culture in the eighteenth century which means that present day scholars can barely imagine the mind-set that produced medieval attitudes to heresy. This is the task some of the authors have set themselves while others seek to explain how the change came about as part of the historical search for truth.