Chapter 1 uses the Middle English Charters of Christ to outline a medieval theory of money as debt. The charter lyrics pretend to be deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the community’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

“Indulgence: The Stuart Declarations of Indulgence and Their Afterlives,” analyzes the concept and procedure of indulgence during the Restoration and its persistence in the eighteenth century. It argues that the Stuart Declarations of Indulgence as mechanisms of religious liberty were not superseded by toleration; rather, they articulated a formal and affective structure for political and personal relations that persisted as a minor form in the eighteenth century, as exemplified in the writing of David Hume, Edmund Burke, Samuel Richardson, and Olaudah Equiano. While tolerance is a policy and a practice grounded in a theory of formal equality, indulgence persists as a way to imagine relationships with women, with children, and with enslaved and colonized people.

Chapter 3 narrates the development of Locke’s theory of toleration during the early 1660s and the period of his most consequential involvement in the political circles of the earl of Shaftesbury. The critical development, for Locke as for Hobbes, was the fall of the earl of Clarendon and the rise of the so-called Cabal ministry. This development cast the conformist clergy into disfavour and elevated policies of politique religious Indulgence that were often associated with court Hobbism. Locke was immersed in the Erastian political projects of Shaftesbury’s circle during these years and produced his preliminary ‘Essay concerning Toleration’. This chapter reveals the ‘Essay’ to have been a transitional text, moving towards assertion of a right to religious exercise but still influenced, and compromised, by a striking deference to sovereignty and civil religion. Shaftesbury and Locke, by allying themselves with this mixture of policies, found themselves vulnerable to charges of Hobbism, not least in the polemics of Samuel Parker. Locke’s initial effort to escape this critique can be dated to this period.

Chapter 4 offers a synthetic interpretation of the Indulgence policies pursued by Charles II and James II across more than two decades of rule. Three major attempts at Indulgence in England, and more in Scotland and Ireland, produced political controversies and bitter polemics. This chapter interprets these battles over Indulgence within as skirmishes in the larger war between the politique court culture of the Stuart dynasty and the sometimes beleaguered interests of the established church. Hobbism, in this reading, appealed to politiques and their allies among tolerationist nonconformists. The church’s opposition to Indulgence as Hobbesian statecraft, however, pressured the position of nonconformity and forced dissenters to devise firmer foundations for the freedom of conscience. Locke’s own tolerationism would mature against these broader developments. In interpreting this history, the chapter makes use of the concept of ‘non-domination liberty’ devised by neo-Republican theorists such as Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner