Peter Marshall
The Godless Edition
The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed
By Georges Minois
University of Chicago Press 249pp £19.50
Moses, Jesus and Muhammad: a trio of imposters who gulled ignorant and credulous people into believing impossible things in order to exercise power over them. This was the explosive claim of a treatise that, for more than five centuries, caused both alarm and excitement among Euro-pean churchmen and intellectuals. However, De tribus impostoribus may have been a book that never actually existed – or rather one, as Voltaire famously said about God (ironically in a work denouncing the tract), that it proved necessary to invent. In 1239 Pope Gregory IX accused the mercurial Emperor Frederick II of having composed the work. Over the following centuries numerous other attributions of authorship were made, and occasional sightings of it were reported, though no manuscript survives. Eventually, so Georges Minois suggests, a loose network of heterodox thinkers took it upon themselves to make the myth a reality, and around the start of the 18th century it was printed in distinct Latin and French versions, a compendium of the projected fears of the orthodox and the slogans of the radical Enlightenment.
All of this makes for interesting reading, in a Da Vinci Code-ish kind of way, though the outline of the story has previously been established by detailed scholarly work. Minois, however, wants to use the tale as a peg for hanging up a very large coat: a history of atheism,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk