The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World

By Lynn Hunt, Wijnand Mijnhardt, Margaret C. Jacob

Book Overview

Two French Protestant refugees in eighteenth-century Amsterdam gave the world an extraordinary work that intrigued and outraged readers across Europe. In this captivating account, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt take us to the vibrant Dutch Republic and its flourishing book trade to explore the work that sowed the radical idea that religions could be considered on equal terms.

Famed engraver Bernard Picart and author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard produced The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, which appeared in the first of seven folio volumes in 1723. They put religion in comparative perspective, offering images and analysis of Jews, Catholics, Muslims, the peoples of the Orient and the Americas, Protestants, deists, freemasons, and assorted sects. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, the work was a resounding success. For the next century it was copied or adapted, but without the context of its original radicalism and its debt to clandestine literature, English deists, and the philosophy of Spinoza.

Ceremonies and Customs prepared the ground for religious toleration amid seemingly unending religious conflict, and demonstrated the impact of the global on Western consciousness. In this beautifully illustrated book, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt cast new light on the profound insight found in one book as it shaped the development of a modern, secular understanding of religion.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674049284
• ISBN13: 9780674049284
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The Book That Changed Europe

Commenting as a non-historian, but rather as an interested layperson who tremendously admires the graphic art of Bernard Picart, this book offered me the opportunity to gain some insight in his and Jean Fréderic Bernard's philosophy. This is a tremendously important book. Unbeknown to many, until reading this book, including myself, Bernard and Picart were at the very root of the Enlightenment, the fairly tolerant atmosphere in The Netherlands of the late 17th and early 18th century allowing them to do so. Both had left France after Louis XIV struck down on all that not adhere to Catholicism. Most amazing and revealing is the way in which the authors of the present book describe Bernard's and Picart's openness to about every religion in existence on earth those days, e.g., including those of American Indians, Buddhism, Sufi, and the many Protestant sects, eventually concluding that, though differently approached, all religions have a lot of similarities. Religious tolerance was what Bernard and Picart advocated. In this they were far ahead of their time. Even, and perhaps, especially, now there is a need for similar vocal advocates, with persistent and intolerant fundamentalism present in about every major and also minor religious group, and this includes Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists as well as religions smaller in number. I consider this book compulsory reading for anyone interested in religion and the history of religion.