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At the end of the eighteenth century, Julius Caesar Vanini was considered a precursor of Lamarck and Darwin for his transformative view of biology, which is expressed in particular in Dialogo XXXVII of De admirandis (Paris 1616), where, through a game of simulation and dissimulation based on ambiguity and mischief, he presents radical theses on the origin of man, in stark contrast to creationism and fixism.

The Berger extravagant raises a debate on demonic possession which ends as a « coup de théâtre ». The narrator himself is doubting. Therefore, one can read the text attributed to the writer Onésime de Claireville as a philosophical fiction on the conditions and exercice of judgement. The question is : How can one judge ? On which criteria can one distinguish natural from surnatural, and truth from error ? Finally, in what way a fictionnal text - more complex and freer than philosophical speech - can treat that question ?

Le Gascon extravagant, value of experience and fiction as a speech on the history (of Loudun) : In this paper, I question the relation between the novel of the Gascon and the event of the demonic possession of the Ursulines in Loudun. This event is never mentioned, however it is constantly used as a reference in our way to read the novel. How the written piece that the Gascon is, does take part in the event of writings which is immediately this demonic possession, as stated by Michel de Certeau in his analysis ? I analyse first the way how this possession is immediately abscribed within a common place of the Epicurian philosophy, then how does the story embedded in the fiction-framework develop the gascon’s experience as a body ethics, and finally how the novel can be read as a « history of Loudun » as a symptom. The Gascon extravagant and its forewords are read as texts which, within the framework of the demonic possession, question a body theater functionning contrary to an ethics of actions. The novel would be another form find consolation for the religious issue which was « solved » by the possession on a spectacuar and un-memorial way, since it presented itself as a piece of Gascon – if not Libertine at least Protestant – memory.

Novel and Censorship : the case of the Gascon extravagant : Le Gascon extravagant allows us to view from an original angle the relationship between the novel and censorship. Claireville’s discursive and narrative strategies aim less to get around than to denounce the principle of institutional repression. Like Cyrano’s L’Autre Monde or Dassoucy’s Aventures, Le Gascon extravagant confirms Louis Marin’s argument that in the seventeenth century the real power of narrative would be its ability to entrap power itself.

Materialistic interpretation of the Cartesian MéditationsWhen, on rare occasions, we consider the materialistic nature of the Cartesian thinking, we systematically refer to scientific texts. In this perspective, more philosophical texts are not taken into consideration or are even ignored, as Hiram Caton showed it by discrediting the Méditations because they would only have been written to dupe the censure and buy a reputation for their author. They would therefore have no philosphical pertinence at all. But Descartes never stopped to insist on the importance of combining both writing types: the scientific one and the metaphysical one. For that reason, contrary to these considerations, I propose a materialistic interpretation (in the Leibnizian sense of the term) of the Méditations métaphysiques. To do so, with reference to the words of Descartes, I will start by showing how the philosopher uses the concealment in all of his works. I will show how the Cartesian dualism allows to constitute a materialism. I will finally show how proofs of the existence of God and the distinction between body and soul do not really contradict a materialistic interpretation of the Cartesian Méditations.

En tentant de lier hérésie radicale et libertinage, longtemps considérés comme des catégories bien différenciées par l’historiographie, l’essai de Luca Addante se concentre sur le cas du magistrat Giulio Basalù, qui a conduit à mâturation son détachement de l’orthodoxie et de la foi à l’intérieur du mouvement valdésien de Naples, et en particulier au contact du chef de file du radicalisme valdésien Juan de Villafranca, qui fut l’un des élèves et des collaborateurs les plus proches de Juan de Valdés. En se basant sur les travaux fondamentaux de Massimo Firpo, qui a démontré comment le valdésianisme, à travers la dissimulation, le gradualisme et l’impulsion libertaire légitimait aussi des positions hétérodoxes d’une extrême radicalité, Addante montre comment Basalù s’est élevé au-delà de toutes les frontières religieuses, jusqu’à parvenir à une position d’incrédulité proprement dite, qui peut facilement être comparée à de nombreuses positions des libertins du xviie siècle, et que l’auteur confronte également avec celle du meunier frioulan Domenico Scandella dit Menocchio, étudié par Carlo Ginzburg dans son ouvrage Le fromage et les vers, avec lequel les consonances paraissent notables.

The essay examines the features of religious dissent – particularly in the form of unbelief – in Venice between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1740s. The period witnessed continuous overlapping between fragments of theories, ideas, convictions, which had lost most of their connections with the Protestant faith, and acquired a life of their own. Rather than identifying principles as genetically belonging to one or another tradition of nonconformity, thus, it becomes important to verify how different forms of cultural unrest met and entwine one another in a grey area: their traits blurred according to a dynamic logic of communication; individual elaboration stood out as the outcome of interpersonal interaction. Interaction and public communication is precisely what characterized a form of dissent that appears to have been loud rather than measured; dissimulation predominantly took the form of a selection of places and moments in which “rebel” discourses could go public: the ostentation of diversity was instrumental to the creation of a social identity. Debates worked therefore as stages somehow depriving of responsibility, free spaces of expression, in which theological-political contest marked a free zone where the discussion and presentation of beliefs and issues, even daring ones and for pleasure’s sake, was possible.

The essay examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Venetian Inquisition trials and focuses on the inquisitors’ role in the construction of gender identity. In these trials many women constructed a heterodox and unbelieving identity, often equipped with languages (at least partially) different from the male ones. What characterized the gender-based interpretation of heterodoxy had less to do with beliefs than with the attitude displayed by repressive institutions. Women’s words appeared as less dangerous, less indicative of a link with thought – women were considered to be alien or little inclined to that. For this reason, the pronunciation by men and women of the same propositions had different significance in the eye of the inquisitors: women’s words appeared less credible, less able to persuade, therefore patronizingly considered as less dangerous. The outcome was a curious short circuit. On the one side, learned libertinism used women as part of a negative comparison, by assimilating them to the ignorant and credulous hoi polloi. On the other side, inquisitors decided not to prosecute – or to prosecute to a limited extent only – women stained with speech tinged with unbelief and heterodoxy.

Sodomy in the Theophile de Viau affair: questions of gender and sexuality in early modern France.There is a puzzling misunderstanding about the Theophile affair. While the historiography of libertinism, focusing on erudite libertinism, no longer mentions sodomy as a key issue of the trial, historians of homosexual repression address sexual encounters between men in an essentialist approach, making no distinction between early modern sodomy and contemporary homosexuality. Thus, in the first part of this article, I emphasize that sodomy is a central point in Theophile’s trial both as a literary matter and as an illicit act. In the second part, I historicize sexual encounters between men by arguing that one should not equate sodomy with male homosexuality. Sodomy refers to anal sex between men and women as well. Even when it refers to anal sex between men, it postulates no erotic preference and has nothing to do with any sexual orientation. As a theological concept, it does not pertain to sexuality at all. Finally, it is not associated with gender deviance. In the third part, I suggest that discourse about sodomy must not conceal other discourses among sexual behaviors between men in early modern France and may not be a sufficient means to discuss them. In short, the purpose of this article is to clear the way toward a history of male homosexuality in early modern France from a historicist if not constructionist perspective.

Christina of Sweden is an exceptional case to study the topic of the representation of masculinity associated with the idea of strength of mind in religious matters. In fact, the queen is invariably showed by contemporaries as displaying multiple signs of masculinity in attitudes, clothing, activities and speech, thereby generating the greatest confusion about gender identity, even more than sexual identity (even if the question of her sexual inclinations has continually been raised). But this trouble or uncertainty about gender, due to her exaggerated masculinity, is related, especially in the years of her abdication, to her “libertinage” of mind, or even pure and simple her unbelief, fed by all the irreligious topics circulating in Europe in the seventeenth century. Faced with this double representation, carried by contemporary pamphlets, memoirs and correspondence, Christine did not remain passive: she wrote a lot on her femininity and her masculinity, in relation to her queen’s status and her decision to abdicate, when she was in Rome engaged in a new form of heterodoxy – quietism –, she came back without remorse on his long years of unbelief.

According to Pierre Charron’s reflections on the « preud’homie », the dissociation between the figure of the free thinker and the gender of the weaker sex prevailed as a founding principle of the libertine-inspired literature. For all that, do we have to believe that, in the heterodox culture of the 17th century, the masculinity of the free thinker came from a real genre distinction? Did libertine writers really support a virile image of the natural mind? Works such as L’Autre monde by Cyrano de Bergerac, the Aventures by Charles Dassoucy or La Terre australe connue by Gabriel de Foigny show us that sometimes the image of the free thinker can be linked to the erasure of the sex difference using hermaphrodite characters. At the same time, the libertine power of the gender notion is more apparent than real. At the end, it is only a simple hypothesis marked by the signs of the masculine domination, the same domination that it seems to criticize.

In this contribution Giovanni Ruocco analyzes the idea of social “acceptability”, recently proposed by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé as a methodology of study of godlessness and incredulity during the modern age, and consequently as a clarification of the recent historiography on libertinism. If, on the one hand, Ruocco shares the requirement to always consider the ideas in the context in which they were produced, and seen by the actors as objects of polemical confrontation - also to better understand what in this context was possible to say publicly or not - on the other hand he asserts the methodological necessity, in historic research, to go beyond the temporal borders of a specific social context, by trying at the same time to analyze the plurality of intentions of the involved subjects. The author also believes in the coexistence, in a given political society, of a variety of defined human contexts, more or less structured and long-lasting, in whom every subject can act in a different way, by communicating with specific words, oral or written, as with sounds, gestures, physical actions, etc. This reflection on the social contexts must be joined with the attention to the various spheres crossing and shaping the individual-relational life of the subjects: the personal, internal sphere and that private of the family, the spheres of friendship or association until the public one; a specific level of knowledge, of truth and secret, seems to separate and protect every sphere of others. But if a correct approach of research should examine with attention and compare the knowledge and the truth expressed in every sphere, we cannot consider these ones as really and clearly separated in society: it is necessary to cross their borders, by emphasizing their interconnections. From this point of view, the author underlines the utility to recover the historiographical approach of an Italian scholar of French libertinism, Anna Maria Battista, who, between the ‘60s and ‘80s of the XXth century, judged the libertin dissociation not simply as the renunciation of Montaigne to take care of the world, but also as a potential basis for a moral and political reform of society, from the deep knowledge of the “me”.

This research concerns a foundamental aspect of the genesis and structure of Louis Machon's Apology for Machiavelli : the relationship with the Discourse against Machiavelli by the huguenot Innocent Gentillet. It is based on the preparation of a cross-reference table.

This paper dedicated to Jacques Vallée Des Barreaux is a case study in order to emphasize the heuristic virtue of the notion of acceptability in social sciences and humanities. We take into account two levels of analysis : the first is a clandestine poetic production, where an original and radical philosophical posture is adopted, but which is also composed by more innocuous verses; the second is the public character of Des Barreaux, famous for his scandalous and outrageous behavior. We suggest the formula of restricted acceptability in order to deal with these two levels and their relationships. Texts whose publication in the author's name would be unacceptable are accepted and meet an audience in a relative clandestinity. Des Barreaux’s character, whose behavior is considered scandalous, is fully integrated into the social life of the court and the high society in Paris and escapes public condemnation ; he is deemed acceptable in his familiar social places. Using the notion of limited acceptability allows us to highlight that the limits of what is acceptable in the same years of the hardening of the Catholic order in France was much looser and resilient than one might imagine.

Incest plays a major role in the novel of Filippo D’Angelo, La Fine dell’altro mondo : the love between Ludovico and his sister Umberta builts in the heart of the story the nostalgia of a perfect completeness which should protect from the agressions of the world and the family. But incest is also a major (and polemical) form of the moral libertinism in the xviith century, considered as innocent and natural love. D’Angelo builds with incest the story of a regressive utopia ended in failure and desillusionment.

The paper takes as its starting point a translation or, better, an adaptation into Italian of ‘The Widow of Ephesus’, the well-known story from Petronius’ Satyricon. The translation is by Annibale Campeggi (1593-1630), member of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti. Published in 1630 and then reprinted in the collective work by the Incogniti the Cento Novelle Amorose (Venice, 1651), Campeggi’s transposition exploits the Petronian model in order to display a proper conversion to libertinism: indeed, in the Italian version, at first the widow expresses her faith in the resurrection but, then, the rational speech by the soldier makes her abandon any metaphysical scruples for a life inspired to naturalism.Most of the studies devoted to the Incogniti libertinism recognise the influence exercised on the Accademia by the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631), particularly stressing that the latter had denied the immortality of the individual soul. On the contrary, according to certain historians of the philosophy, Cremonini’s irreligiousness is nothing but a myth: actually, Cremonini had adhered to the so-called doctrine of double truth, denying the immortality of the soul as philosopher but not from the theological point of view. Thus, the paper examines the notion of ‘double truth’ to show that even the Church considered such an argument a stratagem to avoid censorship and concludes reaffirming the heterodoxy of Cremonini’s Aristotelianism.

In La Mothe Le Vayer’s Dialogues Made in Imitation of the Ancients, Nature, studied from various aspects, appears in particular as the object of physics. However, if the Dialogues claim to reject skeptically all physics, in fact Aristotle is particularly concerned. Specifically, three approaches converge in a questioning of Aristotelian scholasticism. The first is to use Aristotle’s physics against metaphysics and theology. The second is to question this very Aristotelian physics by attacking its principles. The third is to put forward the critique of the Aristotelian cosmos led by Copernicanism. While most authors quoted by La Mothe Le Vayer are chosen among the philosophers of the Antiquity, the text is still enrolled in the movement of questioning of Aristotelianism in the first seventeenth century, and part of the conditions for the development of a "new science". The fact remains that for La Mothe Le Vayer, the implications of the examination of physics exceed a strictly scientific framework.