Dark brilliance The Age of Reason : from Descartes to Peter the Great

The "age of reason" that kicked off the Enlightenment was really "an age of unreason" so chaotic it prompted exceptional minds to seek out order amid the disorder, according to this panoramic account. Philosopher Strathern (The Florentines) depicts Europe's 17th century as dominated by religious intolerance and constant warfare, as well as fortunes built on the flourishing of the slave trade, the violent extraction of resources from the Americas, and the invention of stock market speculation (with the Tulipmania phenomenon leading to the first market crash). The Enlightenment was therefore not inevitable, Strathern suggests, but the product of canny minds seeking a way through the madness--like Caravaggio's introduction of a mordant humanism into fine art's biblical subject matter, or Thomas Hobbes's attempts to make sense of the volatility of the English Civil War in his political writing. Strathern paints the "unreasonableness" of the era as not merely a retrospective insight, but a quality that was perceptible at the time. That the ever-deluded Don Quixote became the era's most popular literary character is evidence enough to bolster his case, but Strathern also points to other minor signs (a "prime example" of the era's habitual absurdity, he writes, is that Oliver Cromwell's show trial of Charles I was called "Rex v. Rex," or "King v. King"). It's an enlightening perspective on a not very enlightened era. (Jan.)

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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.