Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century is a revisionary account of the forms of thought and belief that have been rejected or suppressed by orthodox Christianity over the course of the centuries. Formidably erudite without ever drifting into dry scholasticism, Resistance to Christianity ranges from the origins of the Bible to the fraught doctrinal controversies of the fourth century to the Levellers and Jansenists of the early modern period, thereby revealing the too-little-known history that lies behind the modern world’s theological horizons.

Resistance to Christianity is far more, however, than a study of religious movements and ideas; indeed, Vaneigem is bracingly unapologetic in his ambition “to examine the resistance that the inclination to natural liberty has, for nearly twenty centuries, opposed to . . . Christian oppression.” The story of how men and women have again and again resisted the authoritarian implications of religious orthodoxy is, above all, a crucial strand of the history of human freedom.

Bill Brown’s translation makes available in English a major work by one of the preeminent thinkers of our time. A remarkable feat of historical scholarship that deserves to be widely read, Resistance to Christianity represents radical thought at its most exciting, incisive, and compelling.