Nigel Aston

University of Leicester, United Kingdom

September–December 2003

Nigel Aston is lecturer in early modern European history at the University of Leicester. His research activities and interests continue to center on the history of religion in western Europe during the eighteenth-century, most especially on the place of clergy in politics and intellectual life. His publications include Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Religion and Revolution in France 1780-1804 (Macmillan, 2000); and The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution 1786-1790 (Oxford University Press, 1992). At the Clark, Aston will complete his monograph entitled Religion, Enlightenment and Art in Eighteenth-Century Europe, a revisionist, cross-disciplinary study predicated on the continuing public and private import of Christianity throughout the era and the neglected religious iconography to which it gave rise.