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L’elaborato analizza la ricezione del pensiero di Origene di Alessandria (c. 184-c.253) nell’opera del teologo arminiano Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736), soffermandosi in particolare sulla concezione origeniana della libertà e sulle questioni che vi sono annesse. Tale analisi consente anche di chiarire alcune pratiche argomentative e dinamiche intellettuali, soprattutto riguardanti i dibattiti religiosi ed interconfessionali, nella seconda metà del XVII secolo. L’elaborato è diviso in tre sezioni. La prima, di carattere introduttivo, mira ad indagare le premesse epistemologiche di Le Clerc, nonché la sua relazione con le auctoritates religiose ed intellettuali del passato. La seconda sezione prende in esame le citazioni dirette di Origene presenti nella vasta produzione di Le Clerc, come pure i suoi rimandi all’opera dell’Alessandrino e al suo pensiero, consentendo in questo modo di delineare un quadro preciso dell’Origene letto e reinterpretato da Le Clerc. La terza sezione restringe infine il campo d’indagine allo sguardo che Le Clerc porta sulla dimensione più propriamente teologica di Origene ed in particolar modo su quel nodo di concetti che ruota attorno al tema della libertà umana (peccato originale, grazia e predestinazione, il problema del male). Questo studio mostra come, malgrado l’indubbia, e talvolta malcelata, simpatia per Origene, Le Clerc non possa essere definito tout court un ‘origenista’, dal momento che la sua visione epistemologica, scritturale e teologica lo distanzia da una acritica e piena adesione al pensiero dell’Alessandrino. / The present thesis analyses the reception of the thought of Origen of Alexandria (c. 184-c. 253) in Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736). Its particular focus is on Origen's conception of freedom and the theological doctrines related to it. The goal of this thesis is to uncover, through Le Clerc's use of Origen, some of the argumentative practices and the intellectual dynamics of the time, in particular in religious, especially inter-confessional, debates. This thesis is divided into three main parts. The first part has mainly an introductory character and looks at the epistemological assumptions of Le Clerc and his relationship with intellectual and religious authorities of the past. The second part reviews the various ways in which Le Clerc quoted, referred to or otherwise made use of the thought or the name of Origen in his vast production. This part provides a first result in that it frames, in general, Le Clerc's reception of Origen. This step is, at the same time, also preparatory for the material contained in part three. In the third part, only the material is considered which is strictly related to Origen's idea of freedom and the related theological doctrines of original sin, grace/predestination, and the problem of evil. The result of this analysis, as it appears form the examination of argumentative practices in the previous sections, is that Le Clerc was no simple "Origenist" but neither was he was fully uncommitted to the Origenian cause. A full commitment to Origen, despite this strong sympathy, was still hindered by Le Clerc's epistemological, scriptural and theological outlook.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.