This volume is the fruit of the colloquium "Les Pays-Bas, carrefour de la tolérance aux Temps Modernes", held in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in 1994. Toleration in the strict sense of the word was very much against the grain of sixteenth-century European history. This volume charts the emergence and vicissitudes of the concept of tolerance and its practical implications in the Dutch Republic, from the revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. The various contributions, all by distinguished scholars, address such issues as Erasmus' views on toleration, the relation between tolerance and irenism, and the contemporary intellectual debate about toleration in the Dutch Republic. This important volume will prove indispensable to historians of the Low Countries, students of humanism and all those interested in the intellectual history of the 16th-18th centuries.