John D. Cox points out in his recent Baylor Press book on Shakespeare that ancient skepticism was not a-religious in the Renaissance and Reformation, but often served the purposes of reform. Erasmus, for instance, deployed skeptical arguments in challenging traditional, but corrupt, practices in the Catholic church. Like More, he used Lucian “to excoriate abuses in early sixteenth-century church and society, continuing a late-medieval tradition of clerical satire.”
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