Die drei Ringe

What does the covert history of the early Enlightenment period look like? Maturin Veyssière La Croze was a Benedictine monk in Paris and later librarian to the Prussian king in Berlin. Tracing his escape routes, networks and intellectual predilections affords an insight into the links between his involvement in the scholarly debates of the day and his personal relations with Jews, atheists and Socinians. The motivating factor for such an inquiry is a French verse adaptation of the Ring Parable in which the tolerance issue is posed in the context of the situation in which exiled Huguenots found themselves after 1685. The quest for the author finally ends among the book producers and réfugiés in Holland around 1720.