Cymbalum Mundi: Four Very Ancient Joyous and Facetious Dialogues

…became skepticism in Des Périers’s Cymbalum Mundi (1538; Cymbalum Mundi: Four Very Ancient Joyous and Facetious Dialogues), a brilliant and violent attack upon Christianity. The allegorical form of its four dialogues in imitation of the Greek rhetorician Lucian did not conceal its real meaning. It was suppressed (c. 1538), but…