In 2018, the British historian Alec Ryrie delivered a lecture collection at Gresham School in London framed as one thing of a theological homicide thriller, centred on the query ‘If we settle for Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation that “God is useless”, who, precisely, killed him?’ On this first lecture, Ryrie supplies ‘a tour of medieval unbelief’ as he scours Thirteenth- to Sixteenth-century Europe for dissenting and blasphemous voices that clashed with the inflexible Christian institution of the age. In doing so, he finds nothing just like the deep-rooted and widespread atheism present in Europe at present, however moderately a kind of proto-atheism, constructed from a scattered assortment of scepticisms, particular person experiences, resentments and echoes of Greco-Roman philosophy.
