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Carregando... The Atheist's Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existedde Georges Minois
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In this carefully detailed yet accessible study, Georges Minois presents an overview of a curious myth that eventually became a reality. This is the history of a fictitious treatise devised in the thirteenth century as political slander, whose notoriety grew until actual treatises began circulating to fill its role some four centuries later. It is a mystery story, tracing the shadowy, interconnected threads of a legend that proved significant in Western intellectual history and in the lives of real people. Minois rightly treats the subject as myth: the Treatise of the Three Imposters grew into an archetype, a signifier in the evolving discourse on religion, orthodoxy, and free thinking through various social and political contexts in medieval, early modern, and Enlightenment-era Europe.
A comprehensive biography of the Treatise of the Three Impostors, a controversial nonexistent medieval book. Like a lot of good stories, this one begins with a rumor: in 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. Without disclosing evidence of any kind, Gregory announced that Frederick had written a supremely blasphemous book--De tribus impostoribus, or the Treatise of the Three Impostors--in which Frederick denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as impostors. Of course, Frederick denied the charge, and over the following centuries the story played out across Europe, with libertines, freethinkers, and other "strong minds" seeking a copy of the scandalous text. The fascination persisted until finally, in the eighteenth century, someone brought the purported work into actual existence--in not one but two versions, Latin and French. Although historians have debated the origins and influences of this nonexistent book, there has not been a comprehensive biography of the Treatise of the Three Impostors. In The Atheist's Bible, the eminent historian Georges Minois tracks the course of the book from its origins in 1239 to its most salient episodes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, introducing readers to the colorful individuals obsessed with possessing the legendary work--and the equally obsessive passion of those who wanted to punish people who sought it. Minois's compelling account sheds much-needed light on the power of atheism, the threat of blasphemy, and the persistence of free thought during a time when the outspoken risked being burned at the stake. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Arab translations of the classical Greeks (particularly Aristotle), commentaries by Averroes and Maimonides, and early attempts by Christian philosophers to reconcile faith and reason aroused fierce debate in medieval Europe, where the theme of the three imposters had the most influence. From 1239 on, the accusation became ritual: as soon as a thinker became dangerous, he was suspected of having written a treatise on the three impostors. Minois traces the theme through the works of minds great and small in what reads as a compact history of dissent and freethought from the Holy Roman Empire to the Radical Enlightenment. Still, solid evidence for an actual written copy of the treatise does not appear until the 1720s; Minois’ suggestion that its composition was inspired by the works of Spinoza seems fitting.
The bibliography at the end of The Atheist’s Bible—a compendium of obscure religious and philosophical esoterica—is a wonder to behold. There is also a helpful glossary of names.
It’s a truism that ideas have power. What makes the case of De tribus impostoribus so fascinating is the realization that such power could be almost entirely imaginary: the Idea as a menacing phantom, emanating as it did from a book that no one ever actually saw or read. ( )