About two years ago, while looking for engravings of 18th-century baptismal scenes, I stumbled upon Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, a seven-volume work by author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard and engraver Bernard Picart, issued in seven sumptuous volumes in the 1720s and 1730s. I had never heard of it, but as soon as I opened volume 1, I was hooked. I barely left the library for two days, poring over this marvelous compendium (more than 3,000 pages, and 250 engravings), this book that taught countless 18th-century readers about Confucius, about dervishes, about sati.

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. As Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt persuasively argue, it was a radical thing to put a variety of religions in the pages of the same book, to suggest that all religions could be criticized, all could be admired. Bernard and Picart emphasized "likeness and similarity, comparability above all, not incommensurability. Idolatry appears unthreatening and, moreover, highly significant for the history of humankind. When idolatries are put side by side and sifted for their essential elements, they tell the story of a universal natural religion, an impulse to believe that takes various forms and yet reveals, underneath, its dazzling diversity, a set of universal fears and hopes."

How might believers, then and now, absorb the lessons of Religious Ceremonies of the World as a corrective (for instance, do not indulge in self-righteous caricature of other religions!) while maintaining their commitment to the claims affirmed in the church's historic creeds (entailing, among other things, an abhorrence for idolatry)? That's not in the story as Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt tell it. In the three centuries since Bernard and Picart launched their great work, scholars and religious practitioners have, of course, tried out different ways of talking about "the world's religions." What counts as a religion (and who has the power to decide)? What is gained and what is lost when one puts religions side-by-side and reads them through categories they ostensibly have in common? After decades of an academic comparative religions project that seemed to erase the differences among and between religions, there is a countertrend today to push beyond family resemblances and attend to religious traditions' particularities. (See for example Stephen Prothero's forthcoming book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter.) Part of Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt's accomplishment is to re-create the historical context in which Bernard and Picart's aspirations—their descriptions of "universal" religious strivings and practices, their emphasis on commonality—made sense.

But The Book That Changed Europe is more than just a reminder of why Enlightenment frameworks of "universal" religious impulses emerged in the 18th century. Like the Enlightenment framers of religious tolerance, we live in a world where religious differences have violent repercussions. Something in Picart and Bernard's project remains spot on—perhaps even urgent. As summed up by Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt: "Everyday attitudes had to change for religious tolerance to take root. People had to understand and to some extent sympathize with different religious practices they had been taught to think of as profane and deviant, if not monstrous." Just so.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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