DARK BRILLIANCE

First-rate accounts of events and geniuses from past centuries.

Prolific novelist and historian Strathern, author of Death 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.