The age of genius : the seventeenth century and the birth of the modern mind / A.C. Grayling.

London : Bloomsbury, 2016.

x, 351 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (black and white, and colour), map (black and white) ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Specialized.

What happened to the European mind between 1605, when an audience watching 'Macbeth' at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground, and 1649, when a large crowd, perhaps including some who had seen 'Macbeth' 44 years earlier, could stand and watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart and the day in 1639, when Horrock and Crabtree watched the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from their attic, successfully testing its course against Kepler's 'Tables of Planetary Motion', in a classic case of confirming a scientific theory by empirical testing. In this period, science moved from the alchemy and astrology of John Dee to the observation and astronomy of Galileo, from the classicism of Aristotle to the evidence-based, collegiate investigation of Francis Bacon.

9780747599425 (hbk)

940.2'52
940.252

English

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