Dark Brilliance
The Age of Reason: From Descartes to Peter the Great
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping history of The Age of Reason, revealing how—although it was a time of great progress—it was also an era of brutality and intolerance with a very human cost.
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 that 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 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 experienced again until World War I.
This period also saw the development of European empires across the world, as well as a lucrative new transatlantic commerce that brought transformative riches to Western European society. However, there was a dark underside to this brilliant wealth: it was dependent upon human 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—acclaimed historian Paul Strathern tells the vivid story of this paradoxical age, while also exploring the painful cost of creating the progress and modernity upon which the Western world was built.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
