The Book That Staged Religion offers a new reading of Bernard and Picart’s monumental Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses, one of the eighteenth century’s most ambitious attempts to represent religions from across the world. Examining the interplay between text and image, the book reveals how religious rituals were not simply documented but actively staged for European readers. Through concepts of theatricality, performance, and spectatorship, it shows how spaces, bodies, ceremonies, and audiences were carefully constructed and mediated. In doing so, the book demonstrates how theatrical modes of representation shaped emerging knowledge about religious and cultural diversity.