Laudator Temporis Acti

Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 27, with notes on p. 279 (I corrected Crammer to Cranmer in n. 76):

The pluralism which underlies modern liberal social theory rests on the assumption that people pursue different goals and that those differences should be respected. In the early modern period, by contrast, disagreement about matters of politics and religion was more likely to be perceived as evidence of error or sinfulness. The expression of heterodox opinions could lead to severe punishment. Save during the Cromwellian Protectorate, it was not until after 1689 that a degree of religious toleration was officially permitted; and not until the nineteenth century that Catholics and Jews lost their civil disabilities. It was also well into the eighteenth century before it was accepted that politicians could pursue opposing objectives without regarding each other as guilty of treason. In an age of violently competing political and religious opinions, the accepted ideal was moral unanimity. Those who failed to adhere to conventional expectations, whether in their religion or their tastes or their personal behaviour, were accused of the great vice of 'singularity', of following their 'private fancy and vanity'. 'Desire not to be singular, nor to differ from others,' warned a Jacobean cleric, 'for it is a sign of a naughty spirit, which hath caused much evil in the world from the beginning.'⁷⁵ Even a group of separatists in late Elizabethan Dover strongly denied any intention 'to become singular'.⁷⁶

75. OED, s.v. 'singularity'; The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, ed. Daniel Parsons (1836), 203-4; Helen Berry, 'Sense and singularity', in Identity and Agency, ed. French and Barry, 179, 194; Richard Kilby, The Burthen of a Loaded Conscience, 6th imp. (Cambridge, 1616), 89.

76. Patrick Collinson, From Cranmer to Sancroft (2006), 161.