Publisher's Synopsis
Long before there were atheists in the modern sense of the word, people wrote about unbelief or godlessness and warned of the dangers supposedly associated with it. The study follows the hypothesis that "atheist" did not serve as a precise designation for real persons, but as an enemy image that could answer to a wide variety of purposes. It remained unchanged for more than 200 years and appeared under different names. Whether atheist, politicus, impius, epicurean, mocker of religion, or freethinker: this complex, by means of which a society in flux came to understand its own foundations, can be traced from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Leading minds from several epochs participated in it. In this book they have their say in numerous individual analyses. The assumption that it was orthodoxy alone fighting against 'unbelief' must ultimately be considered obsolete.
