What is it about?
This article shows how early modern freethinkers turned miracles into literary experiments. Instead of treating them as divine events, they reproduced them with natural magic, stage tricks, or—most importantly—through fiction and parody. By rewriting biblical wonders in novels and stories, authors like Bruno, Vanini, Naudé, and Sorel revealed that miracles could be seen as literary inventions. The study argues that atheism did not emerge only from philosophy or science, but also from the new powers of literature.
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Why is it important?
Because it shows that modern unbelief arises also from the powers of literature: parody, intertext, and pastiche make readers experience the mechanics of miracle-narratives and, through immersion and suspension of disbelief, reclassify the supernatural as a literary effect.
Perspectives
What I hope this article shows is that literature has always been more than entertainment: it can be a tool of emancipation. In the seventeenth century, rewriting miracles in fiction gave readers the ability to question received truths and to see religion itself as a constructed narrative. Today, the same capacity to distinguish between truth and fabrication, to read critically, is just as vital. More than anything, I want readers to come away with a renewed sense of how powerful literature is in helping us challenge preconceived ideas and imagine freedom of thought.
Adrien Mangili
Universite Toulouse Jean Jaures
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Subversive Reproducibility of Miracles, August 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.30965/9783846768983_017.
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