Enlightenment

J.H.M. Salmon asserts that René Descartes and Blaise Pascal stand out from other men of letters of their era due to the enduring relevance of their lives and works.

W. Bruce Lincoln describes how Enlightenment figures and themes drifted gradually westward, to the Russia of Peter the Great.

Throughout his long life, including his years in Russia, Ribeiro Sanches kept in touch with ‘Men of Reason’ in many European countries.

Stuart Andrews describes how the founder of Methodism shared the encyclopaedic concern with science that characterizes the eighteenth century.

George A. Rothrock describes how the age of Enlightenment was eager for secular, rational explanations of the world, and welcomed the scepticism of Diderot’s contributors.

William Seymour introduces the scientist, architect, gardener, forester and book-collector, John Evelyn; one of the most distinguished polymaths of the English seventeenth century.

W. Brownlie Hendry describes how a sixteenth-century Scottish laird, with, in Gibbon's words, ‘a head to contrive and a hand to execute,’ worked out the powerful aid to mathematical calculation known as logarithms.

Avi Lifschitz considers the changing meanings of the Enlightenment, both to those who created it and those historians who have since attempted to define it.

A characteristic product of eighteenth-century liberalism, the twenty-eight volumes of French Encyclopedia are here reviewed and reassessed by John Lough.

An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.