"People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish …
"It is well known that Thomas Hobbes wrote his political theory multiple times. 'This little MS. treatise [The Elements of Law: Natural & Politic] grew to be his Booke De Cive, and at last grew there to be the so formidable LEVIATHAN.' The first work circulated in manuscript in …
"In this first comprehensive study of the effect of Lucretius's De rerum natura on Florentine thought in the Renaissance, Alison Brown demonstrates how Lucretius was used by Florentine thinkers - earlier and more widely than has been supposed - to provide a radical critique of p…
"Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was one of the preeminent figures of the Italian Renaissance. He was also one of the most paradoxical. He spent an incredible amount of time writing notebooks, perhaps even more time than he ever held a brush, yet at the same time Leonardo was Rena…
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), renowned as a mathematician, encyclopedist, astrologer, and autobiographer, was by profession a medical practitioner. His copious writings on medicine reflect both the complexity and diversity of the Renaissance medical world and the breadth of his …