This volume opens with Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and also contains his earlier Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), extracts from the Third Letter for Toleration (1692), and a large body of his briefer essays and memoranda on this theme. As editor Mark Goldie writes in the introduction, A Letter Concerning Toleration “was one of the seventeenth century’s most eloquent pleas to Christians to renounce religious persecution.”

This Liberty Fund edition provides the first fully annotated modern edition of A Letter Concerning Toleration, offering the reader explanatory guidance to Locke’s rich reservoir of references and allusions.

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Divinity and State.

Mark Goldie is Reader in British Intellectual History at the University of Cambri EAe.