Beschrijving
What is the past and what can we really know about it? Relying on his groundbreaking technique championing ‘problem-based history,’ Febvre explores whether 16th-century French writer François Rabelais was he really one of France’s first atheists. Febvre’s thorough research on Rabelais and the times he lived in challenges this accepted view.
Febvre asked this core question in The Problem of Unbelief: “Could sixteenth-century people hold religious views that were not those of official, Church-sanctioned Christianity, or could they simply not believe at all?” The answer informed a wider debate on modern history, particularly modern French history. Did the religious attitudes of the Enlightenment and the twentieth century—notably secularism and atheism—first take root in the sixteenth century? Could the spirit of scientific and rational inquiry of the twentieth century have begun with the rejection of God and Christianity by men such as Rabelais, writing in his allegorical novel Gargantua and Pantagruel – the work most often cited as a proto-\
