"The Prince" shocked Europe on publication with its ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) came to be regarded as some by an agent of the Devil and his name taken for the intriguer 'Machevill' of Jacobean tragedy. For[...]

Nearly every empire worthy of the name--from ancient Rome to the United States--has sought an Egyptian obelisk to place in the center of a ceremonial space. Obelisks--giant standing stones, invented in Ancient Egypt as sacred objects--serve no practical purpose. For much of their history their inscr[...]

The work of the Renaissance humanists comes to life in Anthony Grafton's exploration of the primary sources and modern scholarship, classical and modern elements in the world of European letters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Tracing the ties that bound the world of humanistic learnin[...]

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar's already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot's [...]

How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between[...]