The Cymbalum mundi of Bonaventure Des Periers and the Concept of Renaissance Unbelief, 1537–1937

Abstract

This thesis presents the complete reception-history of the Cymbalum mundi of Bonaventure Des Periers, a collection of four dialogues originally published in Paris in 1537, and rumoured for centuries afterward to contain a hidden denial of revealed religion. The thesis divided into six chapters. Chapter I contains an analysis of the book itself, in which it is shown that the Cymbalum mundi cannot seriously be interpreted as having any real atheist content. Chapter II describes the very earliest reactions to the book, and the grim ordeal of its first publisher Jehan Morin. Chapter III traces the process by which the Cymbalum mundi came to be seen, erroneously, as an archetypal work of atheism over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter IV investigates the book’s re-publication in 1711 by the Huguenot bookseller Prosper Marchand, and the subsequent development of its reputation for intriguing scandal in the eighteenth century. Chapter V tells of radical nineteenth-century scholars’ characterization of the Cymbalum mundi as a forerunner of their anti-clerical cause. Finally, Chapter VI tries to account for the paradox that the twentieth-century French historian Lucien Febvre, otherwise famous for denying the possibility of unbelief in the early sixteenth century, nevertheless held up the Cymbalum mundi as a sole exception, and as a precursor to modern atheism. The dissertation closes with reflections on the close relationship between modern and pre-modern descriptions of unbelief in the Renaissance. A critical edition of the Cymbalum mundi is attached; likewise a bibliography of all surviving manuscripts and editions of the book.