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The development of the heresiographic practice in Islam coincides with the emergence of Islamic orthodoxies during the 3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries. This study therefore analyzes the link between the literary production of heresies and the theologico-political formation of orthodoxy within the various currents of Islam. This subject is approached through a study of the role that heresiographic production of anti-apocalyptic representations of early shi'i heresies plays in the dynamics of formation of Islamic orthodoxies and the stabilization of political and religious authorities.

‪On Easter Friday in 1466, two Franciscan preachers in Cambrai caused an outrage by preaching a controversial thesis. This scandalous sermon provoked an intense reaction from the dean of the cathedral chapter of the city, Gilles Charlier, who wrote and made others write a series of polemical treatises on the subject. He compiled them in the ‪ ‪Sportula fragmentorum‪‪, the second volume of his collected writings. As penned by Charlier and his friends, the local pastoral affair became a scandal of great magnitude, symptomatic of the endemic decadence of the times. These writings were thus precious both as the orchestration of a skillfully constructed polemic and as a testimony to the dynamics that gripped the Parisian university in the second half of the 15‪‪th ‪‪century.‪

In relation to scholarship on the construction of the Christian afterlife, this research focuses on two works that codified the infernal underworld in the Italian context at the beginning of the Counter-Reformation. In particular, the book La grandezza et larghezza et distanza di tutte le sfere by the humanist Giovanni Maria Bonardo († 1590) and the treatise De inferno et statu daemonum, by the Milanese theologian Antonio Rusca († 1655), are considered. Bonardo's book presents a hell placed at the centre of an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe, with calculated and precise dimensions. Rusca's book, on the other hand, examines the location of the kingdom of evil with an entirely theological approach. From the comparison between the two works emerges the indispensability of the physical dimension of hell from the Catholic perspective. In conclusion, a possible categorization of the models of hell developed at the beginning of the modern era is proposed.

The intellectual history of contemporary Islam has been considered through contrasting approaches for the last few decades. While some Muslim thinkers have been challenging the human sciences of the “West”, epistemological irenicism has prevailed within the field itself. Reconsidering the relations between history and social sciences, the author argues that history is the most adequate discipline to make the developments in Islamic thought intelligible. Instead of a dichotomy between textual history and social history, the paper propounds different forms of historicizing Islamic knowledge. It stresses the synchronic plurality of doctrines and elucidates the specific temporality of each discipline. Against the linear historiography developed through the lens of “modernism”, it makes the case for a polyphonic history of Islamic thought.