Abstract: This article compares the freethinking of the early sixteenth-century Italy to that of the seventeenth century. The case of Pomponazzi is exemplary: his texts can be read as proto-libertine. A century later, the TTheophrastus redivivus will go so far as to defend thesis of a "destruction of all laws" at the beginning of a new cycle of the universe and civilizations. We therefore need two new historiographical categories: that of proto-libertinism, the other of radical libertinism.
