HUMA-Café - Bart van Leeuwenburgh: Het noodlot van vrijdenker Adriaan Koerbaghs

In this HUMA café, Bart Leeuwenburgh shows how Adriaan Koerbagh explored areas where others did not dare to go. He was the most radical spokesman of the ‘early Enlightenment’, but paid for it with his life. Who was this progressive seventeenth-century doctor, lawyer and philosopher?

On 27 July 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh was informed in the torture chamber of Amsterdam’s city hall that his tongue was to be pierced, his right thumb to be cut off, his books to be burnt, his goods to be confiscated and he was to be imprisoned in the rasphouse for 30 years. Adriaan Koerbagh’s main sin was the publication of Bloemhof, a blasphemous dictionary in which he boldly mocked the dogmas of the public Reformed church with a sharp pen. During his interrogation, Koerbagh admitted having had contact with Spinoza. Who was this progressive seventeenth-century doctor, lawyer and philosopher? This question is the focus of the lecture by Bart Leeuwenburgh, who is a part-time university lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Faculty of Philosophy.