Prof. Jeffrey Stout - Early Modern Critics of Tyranny and Oppression

Professor Jeffrey Stout, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Early Modern Critics of Tyranny and Oppression". It is the second lecture in the series 'Religion Unbound: Ideals and Powers from Cicero to King’.

Religion had no exact semantic analogue outside Latin Christendom when the modern era began. Missionaries, explorers, admirals, traders, soldiers, slavers, and settlers carried a value-laden discourse of religion with them overseas, and used it to classify the peoples they conquered and converted there. Las Casas and other Dominicans turned the same terminology against imperial tyranny and oppression in the Indies. In Florence, Savonarola called for political arrangements consistent with freedom and true religion. As demands for reform spread, lives, liberties, and regimes on several continents hung in the balance.