The recent historiography of early modern toleration has been marked by a deep suspicion of the triumphalist narratives of ‘progress' and ‘enlightenment’ that coloured an earlier generation of scholarship. Wary of teleology, anachronism and the besetting sin of presentism, historians have been reluctant to identify and probe connections between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggles for religious liberty and topical debates about sectarian conflict, pluralism and coexistence. Eager to guard the past from being harnessed to current political and social agendas, they have adopted something of a self-denying ordinance with regard to drawing contemporary parallels. Eliane Glaser's interdisciplinary collection of essays on Religious tolerance in the Atlantic world is a refreshing attempt to reopen these neglected questions. In different ways, and with varying degrees of success, all of the contributors frame their work in relation to current developments, tackling questions of continuity and change, resonance and reception. Several of the essays are exercises in intellectual history. Against the tendency to identify the roots of toleration in secular discourse, John Coffey stresses the centrality of scriptural hermeneutics: in an echo of some of the fissures within modern Islam, early modern tolerationists were engaged in a battle to nullify and neutralise biblical mandates for coercion, violence and terror. Justin Champion underlines the overlooked ecclesiological dimensions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceptions of ‘liberty’ and suggests that the most radical challenge to the presence of religious values in public life was formulated not by John Locke but by Thomas Hobbes, while Andrew Murphy and Sarah Morgan Smith examine William Penn's conceptualisation of political loyalty rather than religious affiliation as the basis for citizenship of a civic commonwealth. Nick McDowell reconsiders Milton's tolerationism, exploring his denunciation of Irish Catholicism to reveal the authoritarian face of the Western liberal tradition. Other essays shed new light on attitudes to Judaism and Islam and the role of non-Christian minorities in the forging of ideas and practices of toleration. Aschah Guibbory argues that the project to readmit the Jews to England in 1655 was thwarted partly by their conflation with the disruptive Quakers and considers the clash between competing Hebrew and Protestant conceptions of elect nationhood, while Jacob Selwood sees the experiment in redefining subjecthood in the British colony of Surinam in 1665 as the real ‘high-watermark of Anglo-Jewish toleration’ (p. 205) and an antecedent of modern multiculturalism. Matthew Dimmock embraces a ‘presentist perspective’ (p. 225) even more energetically, detecting echoes of early modern polemical constructions of Mahomet in the inflammatory film The innocence of Muslims (2012). Feisel Mohamed, by contrast, seeks to preserve the specificity of the different historical moments and contexts in which he assesses efforts to restrain the female conscience within the marital domain (seventeenth-century Rhode Island and twenty-first-century Egypt) by treating them as a monad. Where many contributors are concerned with the organic and unpredictable process by which tolerance grows, Ingrid Creppell offers a suggestive analysis of the ‘moral logics of enmity’, how societies learn to hate each other, with reference to British settlers and Indians in early America. James Kelly's interesting revisionist essay on the Essex church papist Sir John Petre fits the least comfortably within Glaser's rubric, and its concluding reflections on some of the paradoxes of modern religious integration seem something of an afterthought. Overall, however, this is a stimulating volume. Collectively the essays that comprise it present a picture of toleration as a kind of ‘benign coerciveness' and as fundamentally mercurial and ambivalent in character (p. 3). They should help to stir students and their teachers to think again about how the early modern past can inform our understanding of the present. Whether the book will achieve its more ambitious aim of taking ‘a step towards ameliorating contemporary religious tensions' (p. 5) remains to be seen.