CREMS welcomes new Marie Curie Fellow

Posted on 1 May 2015

Dr Stefan Bauer will be joining the History Department for two years from 1st September 2015. He will be working closely with Professor Simon Ditchfield on the project: ‘History and Theology: the Creation of Disinterested Scholarship from Dogmatic Stalemate (ca. 1525-1675)’.

Dr Bauer will deal with the question of how and why the seeds of religious tolerance came to be sown in an age of confessional polemic. His project will demonstrate that an unexpected consequence of the fierce religious argument that divided post-Reformation Europe was the growth of disinterested scholarship, which, in turn, led to increased tolerance of religious differences.

Indeed, once the strict rules and staunchly held positions of Catholic and Protestant antagonists became established, scholars were able to pursue their research freely, even working across confessional boundaries. It became possible to describe change and diversity as historical facts rather than as polemical weapons in a battle of the books. In turn, this paved the way for the religious tolerance championed by several influential Church histories of the Enlightenment. Dr Bauer's research will focus on England and the Italian peninsula, creating a comparative study of key scholars from rival faiths and intellectual traditions.

The project will have a wide impact on Europe’s troubled multi-faith society of the early twenty-first century by providing a fresh, new historical narrative which adds intellectual foundations to the moral desirability for toleration, mutual recognition, and appreciation of diversity in religious debate.