This book suggests that the origins of the thought and literature which is termed "modern" can be traced to the 13th-century Italian invention of the sonnet, th

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th

An ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian Age—and the Victorian mind—by a master historian. Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by pove

A short history of nearly everything classical. The foundations of the modern world were laid in Alexandria of Egypt at the turn of the first millennium. In thi

When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published. Religious and secular authori