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This article, focusing on the Venetian context, aims to provide an overview of atheism, particularly of a 'popular' nature, with a special emphasis on the seventeenth century. By analyzing a few cases and the evolution of historiographical developments on early modern Italy, it seeks to demonstrate that unbelieving and openly atheistic points of view were indeed present in popular, non-academic circles, and that the dynamics of contamination between levels of culture were constant and not always linked to top-down acculturation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter reconstructs the life of Jean-Baptiste Stouppe (1623–1692), a Huguenot of Italian origin who in the 1650s moved to England and was employed by Oliver Cromwell in important diplomatic / espionage missions. Passing into the service of Louis XIV as a soldier, he published some pro-French propaganda works aimed at Protestants, including a famous description of Dutch religious life, published in 1673, notorious for its negative portrayal of Spinoza's philosophy. While presenting himself as a defender of Protestant orthodoxy, Stouppe was in fact a libertine with magical-alchemical interests. An unscrupulous and ambiguous figure, his intellectual trajectory is clearly inserted in what has been defined as the crisis of the European conscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite his reputation as a narcissistic Anabaptist messiah, after 1544 David Joris became an influential spiritualist who abandoned claims of a unique possession of the Holy Spirit and promoted the Spirit as active within the mind of all believers, just as he had already internalized demons and angels to the inner person. He only fully elaborated his mature pneumatology in the 1550s, and since none of those writings were printed in his lifetime, outside of correspondence and conversation it became known only when printers produced these late works starting in the 1580s. In the Dutch Republic, where spiritualism flowed freely, Joris's creative approach to the Spirit helped shape discourse on religion and philosophy among nonconformists such as the Doopsgezinden (baptism-minded people, i.e., Mennonites) and Collegiants. These in turn contributed to the conversations of early Enlightenment philosophers, such as Descartes and Spinoza. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]