The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. asilvering (talk) 22:05, 3 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Société Angélique (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log )

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A couple passing references do not make this a real thing...

• Note: This discussion has been included in the France and Organizations lists of deletion discussions. -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 13:42, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Apparently there was an ill-attended previous AfD under a different page name: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Angelic_Society

Delete: as I wrote on the TP, there's no serious scholarship that I can find on this subject... there seems to be a curious conflation of a geographical name in Lyon (Angélique, cf. this article) with a coterie/cenacle of humanists that really did exist but was not named... An article of interest: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20673401 (which pretty much categorically debunks the existence of this "secret society"). -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 22:16, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I just noticed a previous AfD in 2014, which relies on an Editions Arqa book (definitely not an RS, the book is not even held by the BM de Lyon!) and a few passing mentions... -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 14:08, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge to the article on Sebastian Gryphius, because of, if nothing else, Henri Baudrier's reference, and the subsequent debunking of the existence of such a secret society. The discussion of the Société Angélique is more than just in passing, see for example La Société Angélique by Célestin Valois (2007), regardless of the credence one gives to her conclusions. The society remains of current interest, as Jean-henri Probst-biraben inputs Rabelais' membership in the Société Angélique in his Rabelais et les secrets du Pantagruel (2020). Jean-henri Probst-biraben further discusses the Grasset d'Orcet reference currently cited in our Wikipedia article. In Étude de la production éditoriale de Sébastien Gryphe sur deux années caractéristiques : 1538 et 1550 (2000) the authors expressly discuss the involvement of Sebastian Gryphius with free-thinkers and other reformers, and its importance whether or not the secret society, Société Angélique, as described by Baudrier, existed. SashiRolls mentioned that the Editions Arqa book wasn't in the BM de Lyon, but the cited material was an extract published in the online journal Les Chroniques de Mars. Patrick Berlier's book, La Société Angélique in two volumes (272 pages ISBN 2-7551-0002-8 (2004) and 317 pages ISBN 2-7551-0011-7 (2005)) is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). --Bejnar (talk) 19:09, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Could you provide evidence that the Baladins de la Tradition website you link to or the Editions Arqa or Éditions de la Tarente volumes are peer-reviewed? Thanks. As for the reference to Bats, the authors say Au XIXe siècle, Henri Baudrier qualifie l'Atelier du Griffon de « société angélique pour les libres-penseurs ». Ce propos reste sans doute à nuancer, mais il est vrai que Gryphe, qui ne paraît pas avoir adhéré au protestantisme répandu dans les milieux de l’imprimerie lyonnaise, n’a pas hésité à fréquenter des réformés. Several things are worth noting. First Baudrier himself rejects the name, but cites another 19th C. scholar and accuses him of sloppy scholarship (M. Pierre Gauthiez, Etudes sur le xvi° siècle, traite assez légèrement ce même sujet en ces termes:). Second, Bats et al. note that this claim needs nuance. Third, in the published version of the text in conference proceedings this sentence has been removed, presumably due to the error mentioned above (Baudrier is citing another author whose claim he rejects). (Cf. sommaire, text #3, I have the book in front of me and can attest that the claim has been removed in the context of the peer-reviewed volume published in 2008). What is WP:DUE is already included in the Sebastien Gryphe article, there is no need to add anything further from these "esoterica" peddlers... Also, the BNF serves as "dépôt légal" like the LOC, the book existing in their catalog is not a guarantee of its quality. -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 19:27, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Comments above attest to lively scholarly discussion of the fictional Société Angélique (or the hoax of the Société Angélique, whichever you prefer). The realness of the subject is not a factor in its notability; cf. Garduña or Deep state in the United States. Fictional constructs by occultists and bad historians are discussed where notable, e.g. Witch-cult hypothesis. I'm no expert on the historiography but if RS emphasise the shoddiness of work which purports the existence of this society as much as it sounds like they do, a move to something like "Société Angélique hoax" could be a way to satisfy concerns? Nonetheless, the subject itself clearly meets GNG. —Kilopylae (talk) 16:24, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: to help the closer assess the "liveliness" of the "scholarly discussion", a search for the ISBNs cited above for Berlier in SUDOC shows they are not found in any university library anywhere in France / Navarre. Searching for "Société Angélique" in the title field shows that there are zero books in any university libraries with these words in the title. Reminder WP:GNG requires multiple reliable sources, rather than fringe esoterica. (Here are the nine results in all of JStor, only one of which is related to the subject because it contains (only) the erroneous quote from Bats etal. previously published on en.wp --i.e. likely citogenesis). Here are the five results in Persée, all unrelated to the subject here. -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 17:07, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Further data point: The 13-page index of names in Quid Novi: Sébastien Gryphe, à l'occasion du 450e anniversaire de sa mort (Enssib) allows us to determine if any of the people cited above are mentioned in the conference papers of the experts on the subject. Patrick Berlier, Claude Sosthène Grasset d'Orcet, Jean-Henri Probst-Biraben, Michael Lamy, Pierre Gauthiez, and Nicolas de Lange are all absent from this index, suggesting their relevance to Gryphe scholarship is insignificant. Baudrier, critical of the formal existence of this alleged society, is extensively cited, and the Bats et al. article is published, as mentioned above, without the reference to a putative société angélique found in the pre-press version cited in the en.wp entry. (nb: there is no fr.wp entry) -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 10:43, 25 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As such, the suggestion above that we move the entry to Société Angélique hoax seems to me unnecessary. -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 10:51, 25 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is convincing—I now agree that the outcome should be delete. My previous answer misjudged the situation and assumed it was a widely-discussed idea in a bygone period that modern historians often take a moment to dismiss in passing; SashiRolls does a good job of showing that it is in fact a totally fringe notion mostly ignored (rather than dismissed) by mainstream academics. For me this is the relevant distinction. —Kilopylae (talk) 14:10, 25 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:05, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.