New World Behn: Toleration, Geography, and the Question of Humanity

Imagining European religious toleration in the early modern period demands the imagination of space: space as contained within national borders; spaces real and imagined of communities in communion (the parish, the graveyard); space outside borders for escape or inside them for refuge. It was long the practice of the English to move across borders in space to achieve freedom for the expression of unorthodox religious belief. Across national borders, voluntary flight – whether that of sixteenth-century reformers John Foxe or John Bale to Geneva, of the early modern recusants choosing safety in continental convents and religious houses, or of some