One of the main consequences of recent work in early modern intellectual and religious history has been a discrediting of the notion of a sudden and dramatic transition to the spiritual world of the Enlightenment. Scholars are increasingly examining the underlying spiritual trends and tendencies which confirm the variety and complexity of the slow movement from Renaissance to Enlightenment, and the profound impact of many of the manifestations of intellectual and religious tension during the early modern period. The essays in this volume are a contribution to this process of reappraisal,...

The ancient problem of fatalism, more particularly theological fatalism, has resurfaced with surprising vigour in the second half of the twentieth century. Two questions predominate in the debate: (1) Is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom and (2) How can God foreknow future free acts? Having surveyed the historical background of this debate in The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Brill: 1988), William Lane Craig now attempts to address these issues critically. His wide-ranging discussion brings together a thought-...

This book deals with Eriugena's anthropology in the general context of his thinking on universal nature.
At the outset the role of man seems to be conditioned by nature's dynamic development through the Neoplatonic stages of procession and return. As man is located at the turning- point between procession and return, he is not only governed by nature's unfolding, but can also exercise control over it. Thus it is shown that man should be seen as much more independent than the cosmological structure of Eriugena's philosophy of nature seems to indicate.
The study of Eriugena's anthropology...

This volume consists of more than twenty articles by Richard H. Popkin on the history of modern philosophy, written between 1980 and 1990, including several not published before this.
The topics covered in these studies range over religious and theological influences in modern philosophy, further material in the history of scepticism dealing with Hobbes, Henry More and Pascal, as well as Moritz Schlick, new findings about Spinoza, pre-Adamism, Ralph Cudworth, Isaac Newton's religious views, 18th century racism, and the liberalism of Condorcet.

The proceedings of the first major international conference on the philosophy of Spinoza to be held in the United States are published here. Contained are papers on all aspects of Spinoza's thought by 31 distinguished scholars from the United States, Europe, Israel and Australia including Jonathan Bennett, Alan Donagan, Margaret Wilson, Amelie Rorty, Richard Popkin, Jean-Marie Beyssade, Alexandre Matheron, Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Emilia Giancotti, Hubertus Hubbeling, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. Topics discussed are Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Moral,...

Symbols as Power deals with the period between the end of the Investiture Contest in 1122 and the re-establishment of the Roman Senate in 1143. It was a time of transition when popes had to chart new policies relating to the church and the empire. This study concentrates on information encoded in such media as art, architecture, ecclesiastical furniture, pageantry and liturgy. Combined with written sources it analyzes the ideology and policies of each of the four popes reigning in this period. In some cases they manipulated these media as propaganda, and in others their views were less...

This study on Flavia Julia Helena Augusta, mother of Constantine the Great, is divided into two parts. The purpose of the first part is to ascertain the facts of Helena's life on the basis of reliable historical sources. The second part deals with the legends concerning the discovery of the True Cross in Jerusalem by Helena. Fact and fiction, which are so often confused in the secondary literature, are carefully distinguished.
The first part deals with subjects like Helena's life before the reign of Constantine, her residences in Trier and Rome, her conversion, her position at the court of...

This book brings out the profound influence of the tradition of philosophical skepticism on political thought. It shows that many of the root ideas of liberalism in early modern thought were a product of engagement with the skeptical tradition.
The book begins with the first extended discussion in the literature of the political implications of ancient skepticism, asking the question, "Can Skeptics Live a Skeptical Politics?" The following sections explore the influence of skepticism on the political thought of Montaigne, Hume, and Kant. The case is made that some forms of liberalism...

The book is a comprehensive study of British travel in the United Provinces during the Stuart Period and largely based on journals and correspondence never before published.
After a discussion of travel journals and correspondence as a literary genre with conventions of its own, the book focuses on the more concrete activities of the tourist: transport, accommodation and sightseeing. A large number of guidebooks provided the necessary information and helped the tourist to write his observations on Holland and the Dutch.
Letters by Edward Browne (1644-1708), passages from the journal of...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch Republic performed a crucial function as the cultural and intellectual clearinghouse of Europe. It was partly through the existence of a well-established and highly competitive publishing industry and book trade that the Dutch were able to play such a prominent role in the international transmission of knowledge and ideas.
Yet our understanding of the Dutch involvement in the European book trade still is limited and important questions remain to be answered. How was Dutch publishing and bookselling for the international market...