This book explores the way in which, working within the investigative tradition associated with the Royal Society, the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) used travellers' reports to develop a form of comparative social anthropology which was to inform his major philosophical works.

One characteristic of European history of religion is a two-fold pluralism--a pluralism of religious identities on the one hand, and a pluralism of various societal systems that interact with religious systems on the other. Addressing discourses of perfect knowledge in Western culture between 1200 and 1800, this book integrates the study of Western esotericism in a larger analytical framework of European history of religion. Viewed from a structuralist perspective, 'esoteric discourse' provides an analytical framework that helps to reveal genealogies of modern identities in a pluralistic...

These essays contest the truism that the social contract is a modern political idea. Just as Rawls came to acknowledge that his political theory built in the parochial horizon of his time, Hobbes's, Grotius's, and Locke's theories presuppose their ancien regime world. Despite their universalizing language, Hobbes's and Locke's theories addressed the age-old issue of resistance to tyrants and assumed the framework of hereditary monarchy. Essays in the volume also relate the logic of their contract claims back to Bodin's and Grotius's defenses of absolute sovereignty and direct attention to the...

How the West Was Won contains articles in three main areas of the humanities. It focuses on various aspects of literary imagination, with essays ranging from Petrarch to Voltaire; on the canon, with essays on western history as one of shifting cultural horizons and ideals, and including censorship; and on the Christian Middle Ages, when an interesting combination of religion and culture stimulated the monastic and intellectual experiments of Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard. The volume is held together by the method of persistent questioning, in the tradition of the western...

Early Modern letter-writing was often the only way to maintain regular and meaningful contact. Scholars, politicians, printers, and artists wrote to share private or professional news, to test new ideas, to support their friends, or pursue personal interests. Epistolary exchanges thus provide a private lens onto major political, religious, and scholarly events. Sixteenth century's reform movements created a sense of disorder, if not outright clashes and civil war. Scholars could not shy away from these tensions. The private sphere of letter-writing allowed them to express, or allude to, the...

Traditionally, Dutch scientific culture of the Golden Age is regarded as rational, pragmatic, and utilitarian. The role of Christiaan Huygens, Johannes Swammerdam and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in the so called Scientific Revolution was recognised long ago, as was the fact that the revolutionary philosophy of Rene Descartes made its first impact in the Netherlands. This book challenges the traditional picture. First, it shows how nature was regarded as a second book of God, next to the Bible. For many, contemplating, investigating, representing and collecting natural objects was a religious...

If Justus Lipsius's Politica of 1589 and its importance to the history of political thought needs no introduction, Lipsius's Monita et exempla politica (1605), conceived as a sequel to the Politica, has been overlooked time and again despite the fact that it is a unique key to understand the precise character of Lipsius's political thought. For, is his widely read political dialogue a Neostoic discourse or is it Tacitean, Machiavellian, or even anti-Machiavellian in nature? Did the work play such a pivotal role in the genesis of the modern, centrally governed nation...

The Battle of Gods and Giants Redux is a collection of 14 original essays by leading scholars in the field. Part One includes figures and topics associated with Descartes, the chief idealist in the story, including Leibniz, Spinoza, and Malebranche; Part Two includes figures and topics that fall on the Gassendist materialist side of the battle, including Hobbes, Bayle, and Locke. In organizing these varied discussions along these themes and lines, something more than the sum of the parts emerges. The reader will gain a breadth and depth of insight into the battle of ideas in early...

Greece Reinvented discusses the transformation of Byzantine Hellenism as the cultural elite of Byzantium, displaced to Italy, constructed it. It explores why and how Byzantine migrants such as Cardinal Bessarion, Ianus Lascaris, and Giovanni Gemisto adopted Greek personas to replace traditional Byzantine claims to the heirship of ancient Rome. In Greece Reinvented, Han Lamers shows that being Greek in the diaspora was both blessing and burden, and explores how these migrants' newfound 'Greekness' enabled them to create distinctive positions for themselves while promoting group...

Hadrianus Junius (1511-1575) is generally regarded as the greatest humanist in the Northern Netherlands between the death of Erasmus in 1536 and the foundation of Leiden University in 1575. For both literary authors and professional philologists of the Golden Age, Junius remained the only significant point of reference on Dutch soil in the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century. As physician, lexicographer, historiographer, emblematist, poet, mycologist, chronologer and philologist, he was a prolific editor (and translator) of Latin and Greek texts. Yet we still know little about...