On the 25 May 1699, humanist scholar Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) sent his latest manuscript to scholar Jacobus Gronovius. He not only asked his friend to publish the work, but he also requested that Gronovius would remove passages from the text which he judged to be too obscene, as Beverland was well aware of his greatest weakness: ‘You know that I do not lack an appetite for the sexual.’ In his early studies, Beverland had treated sex as a topic of open discussion. But after already spending almost 20 years in exile in England, as he had left the Dutch Republic in 1680, he had assumed a more careful stance when it came to speaking his mind on the subject.

Beverland's tragic life story, his banishment from Holland in 1679 due to his works on sex and sin, is relatively unknown, yet his name can be found in recent historical literature on a wide variety of topics. He features for instance in studies on early modern sexuality, seventeenth-century biblical criticism, and the radical Enlightenment. Jonathan Israel has argued that Beverland was the first to develop a radical standpoint on sexuality from a Spinozist position. More recently Piet Steenbakkers, in a paper on Spinoza in the history of biblical scholarship, commented on Beverland's original combination of biblical criticism with a ‘theory of Nature as a blind procreative force’. Only a handful of scholars have concentrated on Beverland in more detail, however – of whom classicist Rudolf De Smet is the most important. But whether scholars have used him as a vivid example, or have studied him in more depth, Beverland's libertine image dominates his modern story, as his scholarship, his person, and his works are usually defined as pornographic, obscene, and, above all, libertine.

One can define libertinism in many different ways in this period, depending on early modern ideas and historiographical usage of the concept.5 With the term libertine, the image of Beverland as a sceptical and relativist scholar is referred to here, as he has often been depicted as a man only interested in sex, who composed an encyclopedia of obscenities to sexually excite his audience and formulated a theory on sexual lust only to justify his own lifestyle.