2025 F. E. L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas

The 2025 Priestley Memorial Lectures will explore different aspects of Euro-Asian intellectual encounters in the seventeenth century – a period during which a number of different European powers competed in the Asian arena. These included the Dutch, English, and French, who joined the Iberians who had established their presence in the sixteenth century. Their intellectual approaches to Asia involved a variety of concrete domains, including questions of language and philology, of tropical botany (both what were termed "drugs" and "simples"), and an ethnographical approach to religions as they encountered and redefined them.