Cymbalum mundi and the Invention of Renaissance Unbelief

A landmark presentation of a notorious Renaissance text, showing how scholarly assumptions and inherited interpretations shaped one of the most enduring controversies in European intellectual history.Bonaventure Des Periers' Cymbalum mundi, a set of four literary dialogues published anonymously in Paris in 1537 and swiftly condemned, has been treated for centuries as a covert atheist manifesto. Challenging this enduring interpretation, Jonathan Nathan reconstructs the intellectual, religious, and historiographical traditions that transformed a small collection of Lucianic dialogues into one of the most controversial works of French Renaissance literature. He traces the emergence and persistence of the "atheist Cymbalum" from the sixteenth century to the modern era, revealing how successive generations of scholars, from Henri Estienne to Lucien Febvre and beyond, reimagined the text according to their own concerns. Alongside this monograph, the volume serves as an indispensable scholarly resource for future research. It includes a descriptive bibliography that reconstructs the relationships among editions and manuscripts, an annotated critical edition based on the 1537 text, and a modern English translation. These materials offer the most comprehensive account yet of the Cymbalum mundi, establishing a new foundation for the study of French Renaissance literature, evangelical humanism, satire, bibliography, and early modern intellectual culture.