Easter Term Seminars
'Time, Toleration, and the Other'
Speaker: Marietta van der Tol (Divinity Faculty)
Date: Wednesday 7 May 2025
Time: 5.30pm
Venue: Knox Shaw Room, Sidney Sussex College
Dr van der Tol will present a chapter from her new book Constitutional Intolerance: The Fashioning of the Other in Europe's Constitutional Repertoires (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which is based on her POLIS PhD thesis. The book considers 'the other' in the context of modern constitutions, with reference to (ethno)religious, ethnic, and sexual groups, and drawing on examples from across the liberal-illiberal divide: France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Poland. This chapter explores the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time shaped Christian imagining of the other as 'becoming' and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity.
All meetings will take place on Wednesdays at 5:30pm in the Knox Shaw Room, Sidney Sussex College.
Convenors: Prof. Eugenio Biagini, Dr Hugo Bromley, Prof. Celia Donert, Prof. Peter Sloman, Prof. Julie Smith
The History and Politics Seminar Series is supported by the History Faculty, POLIS, the Churchill Archives Centre and the Centre for Geopolitics.