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Title details for Dark Brilliance by Paul Strathern - Available

Dark Brilliance

The Age of Reason: From Descartes to Peter the Great

by Paul Strathern
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 7, 2025

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781639367986

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781639367986
      • File size: 29266 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      November 15, 2024
      First-rate accounts of events and geniuses from past centuries. Prolific novelist and historian Strathern, author ofDeath in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City, has written eight histories of Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. Returning to that period, he eschews politics and war in favor of several dozen essays on events and great men and a few deserving women. All his greats lived between 1600 and 1800, an era often called the Age of Reason. A rule of publishing demands the author of a collection of unrelated essays must claim that they are, somehow, related. Strathern points out that his subjects not only lived through a time when unreason thrived as well as it did but partook of it generously. Few will quarrel with this or object to a lively if conventional history of a period familiar to the educated reader but still containing pearls. Most readers are familiar with names like Newton, Rembrandt, Galileo, Louis XIV, Cromwell, and Voltaire, but Strathern provides a thoroughly satisfying experience and no shortage of insights. Less familiar names include Artemisia Gentileschi, a contemporary of Caravaggio and a master artist in her own right, and Sor Juana, the brilliant 17th-century Mexican polymath. Encountering the era's great thinkers, Strathern avoids the easy road of biography and delivers good popular explanations of the thoughts of Spinoza, Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes, as well as the discoveries and even the mathematics of Newton, Leibniz, Fermat, and Pascal. Less an organized history than an Age of Reason potpourri, but a good read.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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