The notion of being freeborn republicans bound the eighteenth-century Dutch together. Yet beneath this general label, many fundamental differences existed. This book explores the varieties of eighteenth-century Dutch republicanism. It thereby significantly contributes to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of Dutch political thought.

Jacob Brucker (1696-1770) established the history of philosophy as a philosophical discipline in the 1740s. In order to separate this new discipline from other historical disciplines, he introduced the historiographical concept 'system of philosophy'. The historian of philosophy should use this concept as a criterion of inclusion of past philosophies, and as an ideal form of exposition. The present book describes the origin of this historiographical notion, its implicit Protestant assumptions, and it traces the concept's impact upon the methods of history of philosophy and history of ideas,...

Based on an analysis of the most important polemics of the Investiture Contest, this book outlines the characteristics of the public sphere during the Contest and how these characteristics relate to the particular arguments used by the polemical writers.

This book contains 15 essays by philosophers, theologians and historians from the Netherlands, France, Italy, England and the United States on Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), the French Protestant who found refuge in Rotterdam just before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). From the early 1680s onward, Bayle published a series of seminal works, culminating in his Dictionaire historique et critique (1697), that is generally regarded to have served as the "arsenal" of the Enlightenment. Over the last few decades, Bayle has been rediscovered as one of the key authors of the early...

Recent scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon prognostics has tried to place these texts within the realm of folklore and medicine, inspired largely by studies and editions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By analysing prognostic material in its manuscript context, this book offers a novel approach to the status and purpose of prognostic texts in the early Middle Ages with particular attention to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. From this perspective, it emerges that prognostication in Anglo-Saxon England was not folkloric but a scholarly pursuit by monks not primarily interested in the...

Present-day scholarship holds that the Italian academies were the model for the European literary and learned society. This volume questions the 'Italian paradigm' and discusses the literary and learned associations in Italy and Spain - explicitly called academies - as well as others in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The flourishing of these organizations from the fifteenth century onwards coincided chronologically with the growth of performative literary culture, the technological innovation of the printing press, the establishment of early humanist networks, and the growing impact of...

Bernhard Varenius' books influenced the history of science in such a way that Isaac Newton, Alexander von Humboldt and Tsar Peter the Great all referred to him. Varenius wrote the first comprehensive description of Japan (Descriptio regni Japoniae, 1649) from a European perspective, exclusively based on a diversity of sources. But the impact of his Geographia generalis (1650) explains his ranking among the founding fathers of geography as a science. He called 'general' geography a branch of (applied) mathematics which does not deal with regional specifics. The contributions in...

In his Nichomachean Ethics (VII.I.I), Aristotle suggests the possibility of a perfection of virtue so extreme that it could be characterized as "heroic" or "divine." In Shaping Heroic Virtue, eight scholars from different fields of the humanities explore the reception of this notion within a broad range of artistic, political and religious contexts and map its enduring importance in the self-fashioning of monarchs and political elites. The case studies included in the volume span from Late Antiquity to the 18th century and include material from different parts of Europe, with a...

Mostly remembered for his library and for his biblical criticism, Isaac Vossius (1618-1689) played a central role in the early modern European world of learning. Taking his cue from the unlikely bedfellows Joseph Scaliger and Rene Descartes, Vossius published on chronology, biblical criticism, optics, African geography and Chinese civilization, while collecting, annotating and selling one of the century's most precious libraries. He was appointed an early Fellow of the Royal Society, and moved in the circles which later gave rise to the Academie Royale des Sciences. Together with Christiaan...

Francois Hemsterhuis (1721-1790) was a Dutch philosopher on the crossroad of Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism. He published his treatises in French, with a beautiful lay-out. They were read and discussed immediately, by outstanding philosophers and artists like Diderot, Jacobi, Herder, Goethe, Novalis and Schleiermacher. This critical edition of Hemsterhuis's OEuvres philosophiques, together with an early German translation, Vermischte philosophische Schriften, published in 1782-1797. Francois Hemsterhuis (1721-1790) war ein niederlandischer Philosoph auf dem...