In 2018, the British historian Alec Ryrie delivered a lecture series at Gresham College in London framed as something of a theological murder mystery, centred on the question ‘If we accept Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation that “God is dead”, who, exactly, killed him?’ In this first lecture, Ryrie provides ‘a tour of medieval unbelief’ as he scours 13th- to 16th-century Europe for dissenting and blasphemous voices that clashed with the rigid Christian establishment of the age. In doing so, he finds nothing like the deep-rooted and widespread atheism found in Europe today, but rather a sort of proto-atheism, built from a scattered collection of scepticisms, individual experiences, resentments and echoes of Greco-Roman philosophy.
Video by Gresham College
video
Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
video
Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
video
Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
video
History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
video
Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes