The contagion of atheism and libertinism (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries)

The medical understanding of contagion (linking contagious diseases and poisoning) provides a framework of intelligibility for the “new scourges” of the human mind, irreligion and libertinism, in the corpus of the literature of controversy from the early modern period. This article examines the process that led, by way of a radical reversal, to the understanding of religion itself and superstition as contagious diseases in the midst of the radical Enlightenment.