Episode two: Atheism Before the Enlightenment | Unholy Histories podcast

The second episode of Unholy Histories looks past the familiar ‘Age of Reason’ to the freethinkers, doubters, and dissenters who came before – those who challenged religious orthodoxy at a time when doing so could carry the gravest consequences. Joining Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall to explore Atheism Before the Enlightenment, are Professor Michael Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience, and Dr Patrick McGhee, Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University, whose current research traces the anatomy of atheism in the Atlantic world between 1600 and 1800.

Together, they discuss the lives and ideas of figures whose questioning long predated the philosophers usually credited with founding modern unbelief. Among those highlighted are Thomas Aitkenhead, the Edinburgh student hanged for ‘blasphemy’ in 1697, who dismissed the Bible as ‘Ezra’s fables’ and combined ridicule with philosophically serious arguments for an eternal world; Archibald Pitcairn, who produced a remarkably articulate atheistic dialogue denying the necessity of God; and Christopher Marlowe, whose alleged heterodoxies survive only in the records of the authorities investigating him. The episode also reaches further afield – to the Italian miller Menocchio, burnt for an irreligious cosmology of his own devising; to Lucilio Vanini, an Italian philosopher and free-thinker, executed in Toulouse in 1619; and to the unfortunate Hugh Price, who in famine-stricken Jamestown in 1610 reportedly walked into the market square to declare that no God could permit such suffering. 

A recurring theme is the difficulty of recovering this history at all. Most irreligion in the period was spoken rather than written, and the evidence that survives tends to come from those unlucky enough to attract the attention of the authorities – legal depositions, heresy trials, and sermons warning of unbelief. Hunter draws a careful distinction between this overt, proselytising atheism and the private doubts of devout believers like the chemist Robert Boyle, while McGhee traces how the most intensely religious writers of the period came to imagine atheism as something almost physical – a sensory affliction of the body as much as a position of the mind.

The episode is available now on all major podcast platforms. New audio episodes of Unholy Histories arrive every Wednesday, followed by video versions on the Humanists UK YouTube channel every Thursday.