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I first met Dick Popkin in Leiden as one of the participants of his four-week seminar on the celebrated anti-religious tract The Three Impostors in 1990. I just had finished my doctoral dissertation on a Renaissance topic, and I had run out of money. I knew nothing about the three impostors, nor did I know anything about clandestine literature, but my teacher Eckhard Kes-sler, a member of Constance Blackwell' Foundation for Intellectual History, helped me secure this one-month stipend. So I traveled to Leiden and was looking forward to my month of paid education. These four weeks changed my life—if I may use this emphatic phrase. Initially, it was not even Dick's personality that made an impression on me. At that time he was simply a foreign professor to me, who was much better acquainted with most of the other participants. But when I was talking to Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, and others, I soon discovered that research on the liberal and radical fringe of the early German enlightenment was just beginning, if it even existed. Almost nothing was known about intellectuals and their debates in Germany at that time, not to mention the circulation of clandestine manuscripts and publications. The Leiden seminar was an intensive course on the Radical Enlightenment for me, and I would spend the next sixteen years clearing the ground in that particular area—a project I am still working on.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8474-4_7

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