ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which Pyrrhonism is perceived and presented in a small group of sixteenth-century texts. All of these are in some sense paratexts that register a reaction to Pyrrhonism: three are prefaces in Latin to the writings of Sextus Empiricus, while the other two are micro-episodes embedded in a predominantly Pyrrhonist scenario. Historians of ideas have in fact been very careful to insist that Pyrrhonism was understood by sixteenth-century writers in ways very different from those that are familiar to us, that they did not do with it what later thinkers did. All of the texts the authors have considered so far set in motion, by means of the various narratives and rhetorical devices they deploy, a kind of boomerang effect: the centrifugal energy of Pyrrhonism, when it encounters the resistance of censorship or prudent orthodoxy, rebounds towards intellectual and moral safety.
