This major new contribution to our understanding of European political theory will challenge the perspectives in which political thought is understood. Framed as a general account of the period between 1572 and 1651 it charts the formation of a distinctively modern political vocabulary, based on arguments of political necessity and raison d'etat in the work of the major theorists. While Dr. Tuck pays detailed attention to Montaigne, Grotius, Hobbes and the theorists of the English Revolution, he also reconsiders the origins (...) of their conceptual vocabulary in humanist thought--particularly skepticism and stoicism--and its development and appropriation during the revolutions in Holland and France. This book will be welcomed by all historians of political thought and those interested in the development of the idea of the state. (shrink)

THE LIFE Of FRANCIS BACON, LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND. THE ancient Egyptians had a law, which ordained that the actions and characters of their dead ...

In a vivid re-creation of late sixteenth-century Flemish intellectual life, Mark Morford explores the intertwined careers of one of the period's most influential thinkers and one of its most original artists: Justus Lipsius and Peter Paul Rubens. He investigates the scholarship of Lipsius (1547-1606), whose revival of Roman Stoicism guided his contemporaries during the revolt of the Netherlands from the rule of Spain and whose teaching prepared future leaders in church and state. Maintaining that Lipsius' thought reached Peter Paul Rubens (...) through his brother, Philip Rubens, Morford analyzes the artist's use of Stoic philosophical and political allegory, beginning with his painting The Four Philosophers. This book discusses the revival of Stoicism in northern Europe, focusing on Lipsius' editions of Tacitus and Seneca, his widely read handbooks on constancy and politics, and his interaction with leading scholars and public figures. As his letters reveal, Lipsius was inconsistent in his life and unsuccessful in reconciling Stoicism with Catholic doctrine; Rubens, although at first sympathetic to the doctrines of Lipsius, is shown to have later transcended their limitations. (shrink)

Avec la multiplication des editions et traductions de Seneque le stoicisme revient a la mode a la fin de la Renaissance. Apres La constance de Juste Lipse (1584) fleurissent les traites qui louent la constance, le travail, la force d'ame, la discipline et l'obeissance, la clemence du Prince, etc. Une nouvelle phase de la longue vie de l'Ecole stoicienne commence dans les annees 1580 pour s'achever vers 1650. Mais le neostoicisme est confronte a un probleme ignore de l'ancien: comment concilier (...) cette morale virile, rude et austere certes, mais autosuffisante, avec les enseignements du christianisme? Peut-on etre stoicien en philosophie et chretien? Peut-on faire jouer les belles lettres contre les Lettres sacrees? Juste Lipse, Guillaume du Vair et Pierre Charron l'ont cru, presentant leur defense du stoicisme imperial et romain comme une therapie pour des temps troubles. Une philosophie par gros temps, tel apparait bien le neostoicisme en Europe du Nord, dechiree par les guerres religieuses, les epidemies, les famines, les troubles civils. Ces auteurs qui sont souvent de savants erudits, meme s'ils insistent a juste titre sur la morale, plus assimilable en contexte chretien que la theologie du Portique, entendent bien restituer l'ensemble de cette philosophie, de la physique a la conception de la religion naturelle et universelle. (shrink)