Description
Book SynopsisIn 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. The author tracks the course of the book from its origins in 1239 to its most salient episodes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He also sheds light on the persistence of free thought during a time when the outspoken risked being burned at the stake.
Trade Review"The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself." -Joscelyn Godwin, author of The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance"
