Synopses & Reviews
The Traité des Trois Imposteurs, ou l'Esprit de M. Spinosa is a most notorious clandestine work that was circulating throughout Europe in the 18th Century. The work is a pastiche of passages from Hobbes, Naudé, La Mothe Le Vayer, Spinoza and others, contending that Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were imposters who set up their religions for political reasons.
In 1990 a research seminar on the origins, nature, meaning and dispersion of the text was held under the direction of Richard H. Popkin, with the assistance of Silvia Berti and Françoise Charles-Daubert, sponsored by the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History. Advanced students and young professors carried out research projects. Lectures were given by the staff plus visiting scholars including Miguel Benitez and Bertram Schwarzbach.
This volume contains the results of the seminar, including papers by the teachers and students. It breaks much new ground about the Traité, including new data about its possible origins and development, the dispersion of manuscripts of it, and its role in anti-religious Enlightenment thought.
Synopsis
The Traité des Trois Imposteurs, ou l'Esprit de M. Spinosa is a most notorious clandestine work that was circulating throughout Europe in the 18th Century. The work is a pastiche of passages from Hobbes, Naudé, La Mothe Le Vayer, Spinoza and others, contending that Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were imposters who set up their religions for political reasons. In 1990 a research seminar on the origins, nature, meaning and dispersion of the text was held under the direction of Richard H. Popkin, with the assistance of Silvia Berti and Françoise Charles-Daubert, sponsored by the Foundation for Research in Intellectual History. Advanced students and young professors carried out research projects. Lectures were given by the staff plus visiting scholars including Miguel Benitez and Bertram Schwarzbach. This volume contains the results of the seminar, including papers by the teachers and students. It breaks much new ground about the Traité, including new data about its possible origins and development, the dispersion of manuscripts of it, and its role in anti-religious Enlightenment thought.
Synopsis
'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."
Table of Contents
Foreword: The Leiden Seminar;
R.H. Popkin. I: History and Interpretation of the `Traité des trois imposteurs'. 1. L'esprit de Spinosa': ses origines et sa première édition dans leur contexte spinozien;
S. Berti. 2. Une histoire interminable: origines et développement du
Traité des Trois Imposteurs;
M. Benítez. 3. History and Structure of our
Traité des Trois Imposteurs;
B.E. Schwarzbach, A.W. Fairbairn. 4. L'esprit de Spinosa et les
Traités des trois imposteurs: Rappel des différentes familles et de leurs principales caractéristiques;
F. Charles- Daubert. II: Around the `Traité'. 5. Freethinking in early-eighteenth-century Protestant Germany: Peter Friedrich Arpe and the
Traité des trois imposteurs;
M. Mulsow. 6. The English Deists and the
Traité; R.H. Vermij. 7. Sallengre, La Monnoye, and the
Traité des trois imposteurs;
B. Anderson. 8. The Politics of a Publishing Event: The Marchand Milieu and
The Life and Spirit of Spinoza of 1719;
J.C. Laursen. 9. Impostors and Revolution: On the `Philadelphie' 1796 Edition of the
Traité des trois imposteurs;
H. Blair. III: The Threads of a Tradition. 10. An Eighteenth-Century Interpretation of the
Ethica: Henry de Boulainvilliers's `Essai de métaphysique';
R. Festa. 11. Legislators, Impostors, and the Politic Origins of Religion: English Theories of `Imposture' from Stubbe to Toland;
J.A.I. Champion. 12. `Behold the Fear of the Lord': The Erastianism of Stillingfleet, Wolseley, and Tillotson;
J.W. Wojcik. 13. `Jezus Nazarenus Legislator': Adam Boreel's Defence of Christianity;
R. Iliffe. 14. John Adler Salvius'
Questions to Baruch de Castro concerning De Tribus Impostoribus;
S. Åkerman. 15. The Struggle Against Unbelief in the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam after Spinoza's Excommunication;
J.R. Maia Neto. 16. Worse than the Three Impostors? Towards an Interpretation of Theodor Ludwig Lau's
Meditationes philosophicae de Deo, mundo, homine;
A.G. Shelford. Appendix: Marchand's Article
Impostoribus;
J. Dean.