Among the most momentous insights in the modern history of fundamental rights is Georg Jellinek's thesis that individualism in religious matters was the real beginning of the Western understanding of freedom. He went on to argue that the demand for freedom of conscience necessarily brought with it a call for further freedoms. Ernst Troeltsch pushed this further and arrived at the view that ‘the demand for religious freedom … tore up democratic constitutional guarantees’. Jellinek's and Troeltsch's work must be seen in the context of attempts around 1900 to explore the relationship between religion and ‘modernity’ associated, above all, with Max Weber's name. Although the generalising nature of Jellinek's and Troetsch's theses makes them problematic, they have retained a degree of plausibility and relevance. Most recently, Justin Champion – unaware of this older tradition – has written of the early modern world: ‘The simple claim […] will be that the relationship between citizenship and conscience was the critical starting point for definitions of libertas.’ At the same time, he laments that ‘the study of the history of civil liberty (as an aspect of the broader history of political thought) and the history of religious liberty (conceived of as the rise of the ‘liberty of conscience’ and ideas of toleration and persecution)’ are still frequently treated separately.

This essay may be read as an attempt to overcome the dislocation noted by Champion. Specifically, it deals with the liberty of the press. Historians so far have not failed to notice that early modern authors created a close connection between the principles of independent, rational knowledge of God and free public reasoning, freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Jellinek had already commented: ‘The struggle for another freedom, that of expression in general, is closely connected with that for the recognition of religious freedom. The history of the idea of freedom of the press points clearly to its religious origins.’ The classic example of this is Milton's Areopagitica (1644), which Nigel Smith, with good reason, has described as ‘that most elusive of pleas for liberty of conscience and freedom of the press’. Other seventeenth-century authors argued in a similar vein to Milton. Here Charles Blount's A Just Vindication of Learning (1679), William Denton's Apology for the Liberty of the Press (1681) and Edmund Hickeringhill's A Speech without Doors (1689) could be mentioned.