Dark Brilliance
The Age of Reason from Descartes to Peter the Great
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- 69,00 kr
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A sweeping history of the Age of Reason, which shows how, although it was a time of progress in many areas, it was also an era of brutality and intolerance, by the author of The Borgias and The Florentines.
During the 1600s, between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Enlightenment, Europe lived through an era known as the Age of Reason. This was a revolutionary period which saw great advances in areas such as art, science, philosophy, political theory and economics.
However, all this was accomplished against a background of extreme political turbulence and irrational behaviour on a continental scale in the form of internal conflicts and international wars. Indeed, the Age of Reason itself was born at the same time as the Thirty Years' War, which would devastate central Europe to an extent that would not be seen again until the twentieth century.
The period also saw the development of European empires across world and a lucrative new transatlantic commerce began, which brought transformative riches to western European society. However, there was a dark underside to this brilliant wealth: it was dependent upon mass slavery.
By exploring all the key events and bringing to life some of the most influential characters of the era, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Paul Strathern tells the story of this paradoxical age, while also counting the human cost of imposing the progress and modernity upon which the Western world was built.
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The "age of reason" that kicked off the Enlightenment was really "an age of unreason" so chaotic it prompted exceptional minds to seek out order amid the disorder, according to this panoramic account. Philosopher Strathern (The Florentines) depicts Europe's 17th century as dominated by religious intolerance and constant warfare, as well as fortunes built on the flourishing of the slave trade, the violent extraction of resources from the Americas, and the invention of stock market speculation (with the Tulipmania phenomenon leading to the first market crash). The Enlightenment was therefore not inevitable, Strathern suggests, but the product of canny minds seeking a way through the madness—like Caravaggio's introduction of a mordant humanism into fine art's biblical subject matter, or Thomas Hobbes's attempts to make sense of the volatility of the English Civil War in his political writing. Strathern paints the "unreasonableness" of the era as not merely a retrospective insight, but a quality that was perceptible at the time. That the ever-deluded Don Quixote became the era's most popular literary character is evidence enough to bolster his case, but Strathern also points to other minor signs (a "prime example" of the era's habitual absurdity, he writes, is that Oliver Cromwell's show trial of Charles I was called "Rex v. Rex," or "King v. King"). It's an enlightening perspective on a not very enlightened era.
