Hear from blasphemes, sceptics and free-thinkers in this ‘tour of medieval unbelief’
In 2018, the British historian Alec Ryrie delivered a lecture series at Gresham College in London framed as something of a theological murder mystery, centred on the question ‘If we accept Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation that “God is dead”, who, exactly, killed him?’ In this first lecture, Ryrie provides ‘a tour of medieval unbelief’ as he scours 13th- to 16th-century Europe for dissenting and blasphemous voices that clashed with the rigid Christian establishment of the age. In doing so, he finds nothing like the deep-rooted and widespread atheism found in Europe today, but rather a sort of proto-atheism, built from a scattered collection of scepticisms, individual experiences, resentments and echoes of Greco-Roman philosophy.
Video by Gresham College
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