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Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe

Studies on the Traité des Trois Imposteurs

  • Book
  • © 1996

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Editors:
  1. Silvia Berti

    1. University of Rome, Italy

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  2. Françoise Charles-Daubert

    1. Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques, France

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  3. Richard H. Popkin

    1. Washington University, St. Louis, USA
      University of California, Los Angeles, USA

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Table of contents (16 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
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  4. The Threads of a Tradition

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 305-305
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    2. An eighteenth-century interpretation of the Ethica: Henry de Boulainvilliers’s ‘Essai de métaphysique’

      • Roberto Festa
      Pages 307-332

    3. Legislators, impostors, and the politic origins of religion: English theories of ‘imposture’ from Stubbe to Toland

      • Justin A. I. Champion
      Pages 333-356

    4. ‘Behold the fear of the Lord’: The Erastianism of Stillingfleet, Wolseley,and Tillotson

      • Jan W. Wojcik
      Pages 357-374

    5. ‘Jesus Nazarenus legislator’: Adam Boreel’s defence of Christianity

      • Rob Iliffe
      Pages 375-396

    6. Johan Adler Salvius’ Questions to Baruch de Castro concerning De tribus impostoribus

      • Susanna Åkerman
      Pages 397-423

    7. The struggle against unbelief in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam after Spinoza’s excommunication

      • José R. Maia Neto
      Pages 425-437

    8. Worse than the three impostors? towards an interpretation of Theodor Ludwig Lau’s Meditationes philosophicae de Deo, mundo, homine

      • April G. Shelford
      Pages 439-474
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Keywords

About this book

'the oldest biography of Spinoza', La Vie de Mr. Spinosa, which in the manuscript copies is often followed by L'Esprit de M. Spinosa. Margaret Jacob, in her Radical Enlightenment, contended that the Traite was written by a radical group of Freemasons in The Hague in the early eighteenth century. Silvia Berti has offered evidence it was written by Jan Vroesen. Various discussions in the early eighteenth century consider many possi­ ble authors from the Renaissance onwards to whom the work might be attributed. The Trois imposteurs has attracted quite a bit of recent attention as one of the most significant irreligious clandestine writings available in the Enlightenment, which is most important for understanding the develop­ ment of religious scepticism, radical deism, and even atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars for the last couple of decades have been trying to assess when the work was actually written or compiled and by whom. In view of the widespread distribution of manu­ scripts of the work all over Europe, they have also been seeking to find out who was influenced by the work, and what it represented for its time. Hitherto unknown manuscripts are being turned up in public and private libraries all over Europe and the United States.

Editors and Affiliations

  • University of Rome, Italy

    Silvia Berti

  • Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques, France

    Françoise Charles-Daubert

  • Washington University, St. Louis, USA

    Richard H. Popkin

  • University of California, Los Angeles, USA

    Richard H. Popkin

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