This volume draws attention to some eighteenth-century figures who, by their mobility, their disrespect for authority, and in some cases their dishonesty, might once have been thought unworthy of scholarly attention. This book opposes the great thinkers of a supposedly monolithic Enlightenment to a peripheral world of radicals and miscreants and seeks to understand the coexistence, and to some degree the complicity, of a wide range of eighteenth-century "libertines" in the Enlightenment project. Through the study of a range of individuals --including female rakes and libertine whores (Con Phillips, Jeanne La Motte, Casanova's Henriette), the great thinkers (Voltaire, Kant, Goethe), and some of the most notorious adventurers and rebels (Wilkes, Casanova, Cagliostro, Sade)--this book reflects on the history of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the Europe that hosted it.