Locke argued that religious belief ought to be compatible with reason, that no king, prince or magistrate rules legitimately without the consent of the people, and that government has no right to impose religious beliefs or styles of worship on the public. Locke’s defense of religious tolerance and freedom of thought was revolutionary in its time. Even today, his letter poses a challenge to religious intolerance, whether state-sponsored or originating from religious dogmatists. Based on both Locke’s original Latin and the seventeenth-century English translation of William Popple, this edition offers a reader-friendly version that remains loyal to the original text. In addition to a forty-page introduction that situates the Letter in its historical and philosophical contexts, this edition includes excerpts from writings on religious toleration by William Penn, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and Samuel von Pufendorf, as well as generous selections from the famous Locke-Proast debates on religious toleration.

Latin and English texts revised and edited with variants and an introduction by Mario Montuori.

Limborch's edition and Popple's translation, as on whether it is true that Popple translated the Epistola into English 'a l'insu de Mr Locke', and consequently whether Locke was right or wrong in saying that the translation was made 'without my privity'. Long research into documents hitherto unpublished, or little known, or badly used, has persuaded me that Locke not only knew that Popple had undertaken to translate the Gouda Latin text, but also that Locke followed Popple's work very closely, and even that the second English edition of 1690 was edited by Locke himself. In these circumstances it does not seem possible to speak of an original text, that in Latin, and an English translation; rather they are two different versions of Locke's thoughts on Toleration. The accusations of unreliability levelled at Popple therefore fall to the ground, and the Latin and English texts acquire equal rights to our trust, since they both deserve the same place among Locke's works. Consequently the expression 'without my privity', which a number of people had seen as revealing an innate weakness in Locke's moral character, reacquires its precise meaning: testifying to Locke's profound modesty and integrity.

John Locke's subtle and influential defense of religious toleration as argued in his seminal Letter Concerning Toleration (1685) appears in this edition as introduced by one of our most distinguished political theorists and historians of political thought.