The Origins of Comparative Religion

Bernard Picart (1673-1733) was one of the most prolific and talented engravers of his age. He was also intellectually curious, and a player in internationally connected social circles—some with a penchant for Deism and Spinozism. Together with Jean Frédéric Bernard, a French language bookseller and publisher of Huguenot stock based in Amsterdam, he published a seven-volume folio work that sought to capture the ritual and ceremonial life of all the known religions of the world: Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1743). Bernard supplied the 3000 pages of the text while Picart engraved over 250 illustrations. Its first volume offered the world one of the most sympathetic portraits then available of European Jewry. Despite being the work of two French Protestant refugees and done in Amsterdam, the book attempted to be reasonably accurate about Catholic customs and to cast a more favorable light on the so-called "idolatrous peoples" who on the whole appeared in most of the travel literature as barbarous and even without any religion at all. In the life time of Picart the Dutch Republic stood at the heart of the European book trade. Picart and Bernard took full advantage of the opportunities they found in their adopted land, and the Cérémonies in its various translations sold a remarkable 3000 copies. Its translation into Dutch and English removed some of the more radical comments about religion found in the original French text, but those translations, and one in German, meant that Picart's images became the standard means of portraying many of the world's religions until well into the nineteenth century.

In a joint project with the Getty Research Institute, Utrecht University, and the Huntington Library, the UCLA Digital Library Program will publish online all four of the first editions of Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, in French (1723-1743), Dutch (1726-1738), English (1733-1739), and German (1746). The source volumes are held by the libraries at UCLA (English, Dutch), the Getty (French), the Huntington (German), and Utrecht (Dutch).