The Enlightenment and the Origins of Religious Toleration
Burgerhart Lecture 2011
Prof. dr. Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles
Tuesday, 25 October 2011 8:00 PM Felix Meritis, Keizersgracht 324, Amsterdam. Organisation: Werkgroep 18e Eeuw / Felix Meritis
The fourth Burgerhart Lecture on the topicality of the Enlightenment will be given by Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles and an eminent scholar in the field of Enlightenment Studies. Professor Hunt recently published about two French-Dutch thinkers of the Enlightenment who were the first to bring into vision the multiplicity of the world's religions. In her lecture, Professor Hunt will show us, how this new cosmopolitan view on religious multiplicity led to a more tolerant attitude in Enlightenment thinking towards people with different beliefs. By discussing this subject, Professor Hunt, as a historian, will make a critical contribution to the current public debate on the origins and topicality of the Enlightenment, since it is especially the supposed contrast between Enlightenment and religious thinking that seems to dominate this debate until now. She will show us a face of the Enlightenment, people are often inclined to ignore: the Enlightenment as the origin of religious toleration. These 18th-century roots of religious toleration will be explained and illustrated by Professor Hunt, by discussing the work of the engraver Bernard Picart (1673-1733). Afterwards, the lecture will be published in the Burgerhart Lecture Series, a special publication of the Werkgroep 18e Eeuw.
Burgerhart lecture Once a year, the Werkgroep 18e Eeuw invites an eminent scholar to reflect on the topicality of the Enlightenment. The Burgerhart lecture is named after the protagonist of the novel in letters Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (Story of Miss Sara Burgerhart), written by A. Wolff and E. Deken in 1782. Sara is the model of a young woman trying to be as good a citizen as possible.
Felix Meritis The lecture will be held at Felix Meritis, the most important Dutch building from the Enlightenment period. The society Felix Meritis first occupied the building in 1788. In it, different departments of the society were active: for music, trade, physics, draughtsmanship and literature. The former temple of the Enlightenment is now a European centre for arts, culture and science.
Lynn Hunt Professor Lynn Hunt is a specialist in the scholarly field of the history of the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. In 2007 her authoritative monograph Inventing Human Rights was published on the origins of human rights in the 18th century. Earlier she wrote several books on the cultural-historical aspects of the French Revolution. Her most recent publication is The Book that changed Europe (2010) that discusses the work of the Huguenot and engraver Bernard Picart and the printer Jean Frederic Bernard. Lynn Hunt, together with Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, shows with this book, how the relatively unknown Enlightenment thinkers Picart & Bernhard did confront the 18th-century reading public with the radical view, that all religions of the world are in principle equal. It was especially their publication C้r้monies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam 1723) that caused a stir within and between established religious institutions, like the roman-catholic church. Picart and Bernhard were the first to study religions from a global and comparative perspective, confronting the reader with pictures of clothing and customs of believers of different religions from all over the world. With their study on Picart & Bernard the three authors throw a new light on the seventeenth- and eighteent-century roots of modern secular thinking about religions.
Most important works of Professor Hunt:
The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernhard's Religious Ceremonies of the
World, Cambridge, Mass. 2010;
Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, Los Angeles 2010;
Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York 2007;
The Making of the West. Peoples and Cultures, Boston 2003;
The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Berkeley 1992;
The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800,
New York 1993;
Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley 1984.
Prof. dr. Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles
The fourth Burgerhart Lecture on the topicality of the Enlightenment will be given by Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles and an eminent scholar in the field of Enlightenment Studies. Professor Hunt recently published about two French-Dutch thinkers of the Enlightenment who were the first to bring into vision the multiplicity of the world's religions. In her lecture, Professor Hunt will show us, how this new cosmopolitan view on religious multiplicity led to a more tolerant attitude in Enlightenment thinking towards people with different beliefs. By discussing this subject, Professor Hunt, as a historian, will make a critical contribution to the current public debate on the origins and topicality of the Enlightenment, since it is especially the supposed contrast between Enlightenment and religious thinking that seems to dominate this debate until now. She will show us a face of the Enlightenment, people are often inclined to ignore: the Enlightenment as the origin of religious toleration. These 18th-century roots of religious toleration will be explained and illustrated by Professor Hunt, by discussing the work of the engraver Bernard Picart (1673-1733). Afterwards, the lecture will be published in the Burgerhart Lecture Series, a special publication of the Werkgroep 18e Eeuw.
Once a year, the Werkgroep 18e Eeuw invites an eminent scholar to reflect on the topicality of the Enlightenment. The Burgerhart lecture is named after the protagonist of the novel in letters Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (Story of Miss Sara Burgerhart), written by A. Wolff and E. Deken in 1782. Sara is the model of a young woman trying to be as good a citizen as possible.
The lecture will be held at Felix Meritis, the most important Dutch building from the Enlightenment period. The society Felix Meritis first occupied the building in 1788. In it, different departments of the society were active: for music, trade, physics, draughtsmanship and literature. The former temple of the Enlightenment is now a European centre for arts, culture and science.
Professor Lynn Hunt is a specialist in the scholarly field of the history of the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. In 2007 her authoritative monograph Inventing Human Rights was published on the origins of human rights in the 18th century. Earlier she wrote several books on the cultural-historical aspects of the French Revolution. Her most recent publication is The Book that changed Europe (2010) that discusses the work of the Huguenot and engraver Bernard Picart and the printer Jean Frederic Bernard. Lynn Hunt, together with Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, shows with this book, how the relatively unknown Enlightenment thinkers Picart & Bernhard did confront the 18th-century reading public with the radical view, that all religions of the world are in principle equal. It was especially their publication C้r้monies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam 1723) that caused a stir within and between established religious institutions, like the roman-catholic church. Picart and Bernhard were the first to study religions from a global and comparative perspective, confronting the reader with pictures of clothing and customs of believers of different religions from all over the world. With their study on Picart & Bernard the three authors throw a new light on the seventeenth- and eighteent-century roots of modern secular thinking about religions.