Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration

"In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures - Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, Locke - William Penn (1644-1718) remains a man apart, a figure whom many know a little, but few know well. In Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration, Andrew Murphy shows that, despite widespread scholarly neglected, William Penn was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed in decisive ways to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. The book elucidates the various political conflicts in which Penn participated, and the ways in which they facilitated the development of his political ideas over a forty-old-year political career.^ Murphy's picture of Penn's political thinking unfolds over the course of five engaging chapters, which focus on the main political episodes that occasioned his sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act (1668-1670); the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678-1681); the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania (1681-1684); and the contentious reign of James II (1685-1688). The book contextualizes the development of