The Religious Toleration in Enlightenment Europe project emerged from a graduate research seminar at Baylor University in Spring 2022. The students of History 5320: Religion and Enlightenment Europe proposed a project designed to track and measure the debate about religious toleration as it manifested itself in a variety of forums across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The research questions at the center of the project include: How and where did debates about religious toleration emerge in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe? How did the conversation about religious toleration change depending on the context in which the debate was happening? What were some of the key features of these debates?

The members of this project drew their inspiration from broader discussions about the nature of the Enlightenment as an intellectual and cultural movement. In contrast to some historians whose work has privileged a limited set of voices, this project takes as its basis Dorinda Outram’s definition of the Enlightenment as “a series of interlocking, and sometimes warring, problems and debates.”¹ Seeing the Enlightenment as a series of debates allows us to move beyond the writings of the philosophes to look at how ideas like religious toleration were being discussed in a wide range of sources.

This website presents the research of members of the seminar and some of the conclusions that they have made from their research. The site has three main sections. The Database contains the data compiled by all of the project’s researchers presented through an interactive PowerBI dashboard. The dashboard allows you to create data visualizations including heat maps and world clouds using the project’s data. For more information on how to use the dashboard, see the Introduction page. In the second section, members of the project have written interpretive essays analyzing the data for which they were responsible and adding their conclusions on what this data tells us about debates over religious toleration. Finally, the site includes a Contributors page listing the members of the research team and providing information on their academic backgrounds.

The Religious Toleration in Enlightenment Europe project only scratches the surface of uncovering the nature of Enlightenment debates in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe. It is in no way complete or conclusive. But, the project is meant to illustrate the ways that digital tools and techniques can add to our understanding of the history of the Enlightenment.

¹ Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 3.