Obscurantism
Obscurantism is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two common historical and intellectual denotations to
Obscurantism: deliberately restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the public; and, deliberate obscurity—an abstruse style characterized by deliberate vagueness.
Anti-obscurantist: The humanist scholar Johannes Reuchlin actively opposed obscurantism. The term
obscurantism derives from the title of the 16th-century satire
Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, based upon the intellectual dispute between the German humanist Johann Reuchlin and Dominican monks, such as Johannes Pfefferkorn, about whether or not all Jewish books should be burned as un–Christian. Earlier, in 1509, the monk Pfefferkorn had obtained permission from Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, to incinerate all copies of the Talmud known to be in the Holy Roman Empire; the
Letters of Obscure Men satirized the Dominican monks' arguments at burning "un–Christian" works.