The Quran in East and West: Manuscripts and Printed Books

Introduction > From the Reformation to the Revolutions

1455    The first Gutenberg Bibles were printed in Mainz

1517    Martin Luther posted the 95 theses against papal indulgences in Wittenberg

1534    The Act of Supremacy made Henry VIII the head of the Church of England

1538    Guillaume Postel was appointed chair of Arabic at the Collège Royal in Paris

1598    The Edict of Nantes guaranteed the rights of French Protestants

1613    Thomas Erpenius became the first full professor of Arabic at Leiden

1618    The beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in continental northern Europe

1636    Edward Pococke was appointed chair of Arabic at Oxford

1649    The execution of the Anglican King Charles I during the second English Civil War

1685    The revocation of the Edict of Nantes made France a Roman-Catholic state

1688    The overthrow of King James II, the last Roman-Catholic monarch to reign over Britain

1755    The disaster of the Lisbon earthquake posed the most important contemporary challenge to Leibniz’s theodicy concept

1776    The Declaration of Independence by the thirteen United States of America

1789    The storming of the Bastille in Paris

1794    The execution of Robespierre ended the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror whose bloodshed and violence formed the backdrop of the nineteenth-century discourse about the role of religion in a democratic and liberal society

1804    The French government enacted the Code civil, which is the first modern legal code to grant full citizenship irrespective of religious affiliations

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