Picturing the Quran – A public lecture by John Tolan

An event to show some facets of the interconnection between Islam and Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The Academia Europaea Budapest Knowledge Hub, in collaboration with the Institute of History of the Research Centre for the Humanities, is organizing a public lecture entitled “Picturing the Quran: representations of the Muslim holy book in European iconography, 15th-18th centuries” by Professor John Tolan, Member of Academia Europaea and PI of the ERC Synergy project EuQu.

EuQu is an ambitious six-year research project (2019-2025) studying the ways in which the Islamic Holy Book is embedded in the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. This ERC Synergy Grant project studies how the Quran has been translated, interpreted, adapted and used by Christians, European Jews, freethinkers, atheists and European Muslims in order to understand how the Holy Book has influenced both culture and religion in Europe.

Venue: Conference Hall, Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, address: 1051 Budapest, Arany János u. 1.

Language of the event: English

The invitation to the event can be downloaded here.

John Tolan is a historian interested in the entangled lives of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages and beyond. He has taught in universities in North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East; he is currently professor of History at the University of Nantes (France) and member of the Academia Europæa. He has received numerous prizes and distinctions, including two major grants from the European Research Council and a prize from the Académie Française. He writes in English, French and Spanish; his work has been translated into Italian, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, Arabic and Korean. He is author of numerous articles and books, including Saracens (2002), Francis and the Sultan (2009), Faces of Muhammad (2019), Nouvelle histoire de l’islam, VIIe-XXIe siècles (2022), and England’s Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (2023). He is one of the four coordinators of the European Research Council program “The European Qur’an” (2019-2025; euqu.eu).