A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age

Steven Nadler's A Book Forged in Hell, Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, published by Princeton University Press in 2011, is a scholarly study of Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, its argument for freedom of thought and separation of religious and political authority, and its explosive reception when first published anonymously in 1670. Nadler is a leading specialist in early modern philosophy and Spinoza scholarship specifically, with several other books on Spinoza to his name. Its strength is deep specialist engagement with both the treatise's philosophical content and its documented seventeenth century reception, including the bans and condemnations it provoked. Its limit is that Nadler writes as a philosopher, so a claim about the treatise's later reception within specific religious institutions over subsequent centuries may need a source more focused on that institutional history.