A major study of Picart and Bernard's work...In recent years, a number of historians have reminded us that one could be Enlightened without abandoning Christianity (or Judaism). Calls for bringing religion up to date by setting it on a modern philological and historical basis and by testing its precepts and practices against the touchstone of reason formed a central part ... Read moreof the Enlightenment project
more central, it seems, than calls for strangling the last king in the bowels of the last priest. Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt have added a distinctive chapter to the story.
Anthony Grafton New York Review of Books 20100624 [This] stunning new work, The Book That Changed Europe, [is] an exhaustive and exhilarating inquiry into the meaning of Picart and Bernard's massive undertaking. At once an exercise in scholarship and a tribute to its subject, this volume makes clear why Picart and Bernard ought to be household names, as familiar to us as Voltaire and Diderot...By taking its readers behind the scenes, The Book That Changed Europe helps us to understand what lay behind the enduring impact of its namesake and why it matters in the long run...Equally entertaining and instructive, it makes us care, and care deeply, about the fate of an earlier publication, underscoring the power of words to effect change and touch the heart.
Jenna Weissman Joselit Tablet Magazine 20100701 In The Book that Changed Europe (a book that is almost as absorbing as the book it is about, and that is high praise indeed), historians Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt make clear just what was at stake in Bernard and Picart's undertaking: they were mapping a way to imagine religious toleration.
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