  Descartes later joined the controversy in a more public way. He included a letter to a French Jesuit, ‘A Letter to Father Dinet,’ in the second edition of the Meditations (1642), which was published in Amsterdam and thus became readily available to his critics in Utrecht. While the letter to Dinet criticised Voetius without naming him explicitly, Descartes’ subsequent Epistola ad Voetium (1643) went further by removing the apparent anonymity of his target in the first letter. The complex history of the next few years, which is summarized in Verbeek 1992, included an official ban on the teaching of Cartesian philosophy by the local authority in Utrecht (the Vroedschap), and the establishment by the same authority of a committee of inquiry into the public controversy that resulted from Regius’ teaching of Cartesian philosophy. The official report of the university committee on the whole affair, to date, was published in 1643 as the Narratio historica (Verbeek 1988, 71–123). Meantime, Voetius arranged for one of his supporters, Martinus Schoock (1614–69), to write an extensive critique of Descartes and Cartesianism, which was published as Admiranda methodus (The Admirable Method) in Utrecht in 1643 (Schoock 1643). The Admirable Method listed, among the most serious charges against Descartes, that he was an atheist and a sceptic, and it implied that he deserved the same treatment as heretics, such as Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619), who had been burned at the stake in Toulouse. While the authorship of this book, Descartes’ replies to it, and various legal charges of defamation and libel continued for some years, Descartes concluded his contribution to the controversy with Voetius in the Apologetic Letter to the Magistrates of Utrecht, which was written in 1647 and sent to Utrecht in February 1648 (Bos 1999).