The French religious wars were marked by intolerance and fanaticism. At the same time the ability of the established church and state to enforce religious and intellectual conformity was seriously undermined. In this atmosphere of crisis and relative intellectual freedom the old Aristotelian and scholastic certainties were shaken. As a result Copernicus’ heliocentric theory became a subject of debate between different schools of thought. Conservatives regarded the notion of heliocentricity as a token of religious, moral and intellectual subversion. Neo-Platonists, sceptics and Ramists used the heliocentric idea as a means of attacking philosophical orthodoxy. The intellectual openness of the period prepared the ground for the reception of Galileo’s version of Copernicanism at the beginning of the next century.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Heller, H., (2025), "Copernican Ideas in Sixteenth Century France", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Heller, Henry. "Copernican Ideas in Sixteenth Century France." Renaissance and Reformation 32 (1): 2010. 5-26. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v32i1.11775. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.