Abstract

Allen begins with a general survey of "atheism and atheists" in the Renaissance, gives brief sketches of six individual "atheists"—Pomponazzi, Cardano, Vanini, Montaigne, Charron, Bodin—devotes chapters to rational theology against atheism and to reason and immorality, and closes with a portrait of the "atheist redeemed" in the person of the Earl of Rochester, the arch-rake of the Restoration who was converted during his final illness. He points out that during this period "atheist" usually meant no more than a person whose theology did not agree fully with that of the name-caller, and that none of the thinkers he mentions merited the term in any strict sense. The book is a wide-ranging, erudite survey without much attempt at either analysis in depth or synthesis, but Allen's somewhat Voltairean point of view helps give it form.—W. B. K.