Can anyone name any famous Medieval European people who were heavily critical of religion or even Atheist? Preferably ones that existed before the Age of Enlightenment.
I can think of a few Islamic ones like Al-Ma'arrim, Ibn al-Rawandi and even Al-Razi I suppose. But funnily enough I can't think of any Europeans that lived in a similar period who were equally or more critical of Christianity like they were.
Am I just ignorant or were there really not that many of them?
Spinoza
>>586219
Not exactly medieval. He may have been early in the Age of Enlightenment but he was definitely a part of it.
King John I of England.
>>586205
Plato was at the very least critical of Greek mythology.
>>586560
Well if you're gonna go as far back as ancient times Epicurus and Seneca were very clearly Atheist.
>>586205
The earliest I can think of offhand is Machiavelli, but he's more renaissance than properly medieval, although he is before the enlightenment.
>>586205
1560-ish so not strictly medieval.
>>586205
Peter Abellard
>>588729
cont. He was a Logician and monk. He once gave a dissertation that was basically "We're going to start with the proposition that there is no god and work from there to prove the existence of god."
And he got HAMMERED for it. The Church did the Bureaucratic equivalent of slamming his head in a car door over and over again and he was forced to retire to a monastery.
Frederick II (26 December 1194 – 13 December 1250) might have been an atheist.
>>586205
Lucien Febvre once wrote an essay about how in the middle age and early modern age people couldn't be atheists.
Here you can read it in french
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/febvre_lucien/probleme_incroyance_16e/febvre_incroyance.pdf
>>588764
>Frederick II
wut? Ignoring pope and hanging out with Muslims doesn't make you atheist.
>>586638
Epicurus wasn't.
>>590885
No but a bloodless crusade securing pilgrim access to the holy land does make you a badass.
>>586205
Henry VIII. Your question has a bit too much forcing of modern concepts onto the past for my liking, but the English Reformation was certainly radical for its time.
>>586205
Um pretty much every philosopher from Spinoza onward.
Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Stirner, Voltaire. Religion pretty much divocrced itself from philosophy with the Enlightenement.
>>591121
> Religion pretty much divocrced itself from philosophy with the Enlightenement.
Get back to the books, anon - you're quite wrong about this.
