A literary masterpiece by a Polish traveller, aristocratic adventurer, political activist, ethnographer and publisher

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of...

The separation of science and religion in modern secular culture can easily obscure the fact that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe ideas about nature were intimately related to ideas about God. Readers of this book will find fresh and exciting accounts of a phenomenon common to both science and religion: deviation from orthodox belief. How is heterodoxy to be measured? How might the scientific heterodoxy of particular thinkers impinge on their religious views? Would heterodoxy in religion create a predisposition towards heterodoxy in science? Might there be a homology between...

Based on new research, a distinguished international team studies the forms in which scientific knowledge was transmitted in the late medieval and early modern period, the ways they interacted, and the people to whom the knowledge was directed. Among the famous authors whose work is examined here are Fuchs, Vesalius, Tycho Brahe, and Descartes.

This book examines Renaissance modes of interpretation as they arise in legal contexts, and relates them to modern debates about meaning and its determination. By placing legal hermeneutic theories in their institutional and pedagogical contexts, the author is able to give an account of Renaissance thought showing how it operates in its own terms, and in relation to the thought of the medieval period. Renaissance legal thought is also compared to modern discussions of interpretation, allowing a critical examination of its coherence and consistency.

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

This study of the world of scholarship and scholarly texts in the Renaissance, the so-called respublica literaria, affords insights into the intellectual infrastructure and modes of thought of the period by its examination of contemporary attitudes towards women. It addresses the questions: What is the notion of woman to be found in Renaissance texts, and how does it evolve? What is the relationship between the notion of woman and that of sex difference, and how is sex difference related in turn to other differences and to the concept of difference itself? Theology, medicine, ethics,...

This book examines Renaissance modes of interpretation as they arise in legal contexts, and relates them to modern debates about meaning and its determination. By placing legal hermeneutic theories in their institutional and pedagogical contexts, the author is able to give an account of Renaissance thought showing how it operates in its own terms, and in relation to the thought of the medieval period. Renaissance legal thought is also compared to modern discussions of interpretation, allowing a critical examination of its coherence and consistency.

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political involvement? And how should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to...