Conspiracy theories in a narrower definition are an early modern ‘invention’ or a phenomenon only emerging after the Renaissance, during the confessional age. Two major types of conspiracy theories were evolving at this time: Those with a confessional, eventually apocalyptic framework from the 1560s to the eighteenth century that were based on anti-popery, anti-Puritanism, anti-Jansenism and so on; and those conspiracy theories informed by the new Enlightenment secret societies and social transformations that were first only imagined in utopian forms. These deep changes in society were then realised during the age of revolutions, with the reiteration and pluralisation of friend-enemy oppositions and antagonisms along the framing social and philosophic-historical divisions between an Old and a New Order. The older confessional and the new Enlightenment type of conspiracy theories merged with each other, using similar vocabulary and stereotypes. All those early modern conspiracy theories, finally, fed upon other factual types of future-oriented narratives–plans, projects and causal analysis of past events for reasons of taming the future [Bode, C. and Dietrich, R. (2013) Future narratives: theory, poetics, and media-historical moment, Berlin: de Gruyter] – that had emerged with the evolution of modern anonymous news communication and the visibility of participants within the political public sphere.
– ‘Conspiracy theories in the Middle Ages and the early modern period’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 551