Part Four: Clandestinity and the EnlightenmentĨ. Expert of the Obscene: The Sexual Manuscripts of Dutch Scholar Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716) The Science of Sex: Passions and Desires in Dutch Clandestine Circles, 1670–1720ħ. Part Three: Gender, Sexuality, and New MoralsĦ. “The political theory of the libertines”: Manuscripts and Heterodox Movements in the Early Eighteenth Century Dutch Republic “Qui toujours servent d’instruction”: Socinian Manuscripts in the Dutch Republicĥ. Danish Clandestina from the Early Seventeenth Century: Two Secret Manuscripts and the Destiny of the MathematicianĤ.

Part Two: Politics, Religion, and Clandestinity in Northern Europeģ. The First Philosophical Atheistic Treatise: Theophrastus redivivus (1659) Why, and to What End, Should Historians of Philosophy Study Early Modern Clandestine Texts?Ģ. Part One: Clandestinity, the Renaissance, and Early Modern Philosophyġ. Introduction: What is a Philosophical Clandestine Manuscript? These manuscripts shed light on the birth of pornography and provide an important avenue for investigating philosophical, religious, political, and social critique. Topics from philosophy, political and religious thought, and moral and sexual behaviour are addressed by contemporary authors working in both America and Europe. Despite the heavy risks, including prison, the circulation of these manuscripts was a prosperous venture.Īfter Ira Wade’s pioneering contribution (1938), Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment.

The purveyors of the clandestine could be found in the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and not least in Paris or London. Clandestine philosophical manuscripts, made up of forbidden works including erotic texts, political pamphlets, satires of court life, forbidden religious texts, and books about the occult, had an avid readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming objects of historical research by the twentieth century.

Alpha and omega on the prowl