Enlightenment

W. Brownlie Hendry describes how a sixteenth-century Scottish laird, with, in Gibbon's words, ‘a head to contrive and a hand to execute,’ worked out the powerful aid to mathematical calculation known as logarithms.

Avi Lifschitz considers the changing meanings of the Enlightenment, both to those who created it and those historians who have since attempted to define it.

A characteristic product of eighteenth-century liberalism, the twenty-eight volumes of French Encyclopedia are here reviewed and reassessed by John Lough.

An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.

In the year that saw the birth of Shakespeare, Galileo Galilei, the revolutionary Italian astronomer and mathematician, was born in Pisa.

Meyrick H. Carré introduces an Irishman who personified the genius of experimental inquiry and did much to influence the Enlightenment in England.

Douglas Hilt profiles a statesman, jurist and man of letters who devoted his generous gifts to the service of Bourbon Spain.

Allen Cabaniss revisists a war between the French and American Indians.

R.V. Sampson charts the philosophical battles that the philosophes fought to publish their Enlightenment masterwork of human knowledge.

J.W.N. Watkins illustrates how the great individualist thinkers of the 17th century had a profound effect upon the development of modern Europe.