The Age of Reason Begins

Summary

The Age of Reason Begins is the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization and the first to name Ariel Durant beside her husband on the title page. Published in 1961, it is subtitled A History of European Civilization in the Period of Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Rembrandt, Galileo, and Descartes: 1558-1648, and it spans the ninety years between Elizabeth I's accession and the Peace of Westphalia. The Durants treat this period as the time when Europe, exhausted by religious war, began to look to reason, mathematics and experiment for the certainty that confessional strife had failed to provide. The volume opens with a long portrait of Elizabethan England: the queen and her ministers, the Puritans and recusant Catholics, the struggle with Spain and the Armada, Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox, and a broad account of the drama and poetry that culminates in Shakespeare, to whom the authors devote extended chapters. The narrative continues through the early Stuarts, the King James Bible, Bacon's career and philosophy, the quarrels between James I, Charles I and Parliament, and the coming of civil war. Further books survey France from the Wars of Religion through Henry IV, the Edict of Nantes and Richelieu, with Montaigne as the skeptical voice of a weary age; Spain at the height of its literature and painting, with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, El Greco and Velázquez; Italy after the Council of Trent; the revolt of the Netherlands and the Dutch flowering that produced Rembrandt; the German lands ravaged by the Thirty Years' War; and Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and the Ottoman world. The closing books turn to what the Durants regard as the deepest change of the period: the work of Tycho, Kepler, Galileo and Harvey, the trial of Galileo, the witch persecutions that ran alongside the new science, and the philosophies of Bacon and Descartes that proposed new methods for knowledge. As in the other late volumes, the authors combine political narrative with chapters on manners, morals, music, art and religion, and they write with an evident preference for tolerance and inquiry over persecution and dogma. Christian readers will find the confessional history told with sympathy for individual believers and impatience with coercion by any church, and they should weigh the book's tidy contrast between faith and reason against the many scientists of the age, Kepler foremost among them, who saw no such opposition. Used beside Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Galileo and Descartes, it supplies the political and cultural setting that the primary texts assume.

Top Lessons

• Why weary Europe turned to method

  The Durants argue that a century of religious war made many educated Europeans look for a kind of certainty that did not depend on confessional authority, and that Bacon and Descartes offered methods to supply it. Students should assess both the causal claim and its assumption that faith and reason were rival sources of certainty.

• Shakespeare in his political world

  Because the volume sets Shakespeare inside a narrative of succession crises, conspiracy, censorship and Puritan hostility to the theater, students can read the history plays and tragedies as works written under a queen without an heir and then a new Scottish king. The Durants' biographical speculations should be distinguished from the documented record.

• The trial of Galileo reconsidered

  The Durants tell Galileo's conflict with the Roman authorities as a clash between free inquiry and ecclesiastical control. Students should set this account beside Galileo's own Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which argues from Augustine that Scripture and nature cannot conflict, and beside the political and personal circumstances of 1633.

• Witch fears in an age of science

  The same decades that produced Kepler and Harvey produced the largest wave of witch trials in European history, in Protestant and Catholic lands alike. The Durants include both, and students can ask what this coincidence reveals about fear, law, war and the uneven spread of new ideas.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The volume's section on science includes the medicine of the period: Harvey's demonstration of the circulation of the blood, anatomical teaching at Padua, and the persistence of Galenic practice. Plague recurs in the background of English and European cities, and the Thirty Years' War is described as a catastrophe of famine, disease and depopulation as much as of battle. Melancholy, a fashionable and serious subject in this period, appears in the literary chapters through Burton and the Elizabethan stage, and the witch persecutions raise questions about how contemporaries understood delusion, confession under torture and mental disturbance. Any reading of accused witches or historical figures as mentally ill is interpretive and should be presented as a reading. Medical claims in the volume reflect 1950s secondary scholarship and should be checked before citation.

• Closing books on science, section on medicine and Harvey

  The discovery of the circulation of the blood, anatomy at Padua, and the state of medical practice in the early seventeenth century.

• Chapters on the Thirty Years' War in Germany

  Devastation of the German lands by armies, famine and epidemic disease, with heavy loss of population.

• Chapters on the witch persecutions

  Trials, confessions and executions for witchcraft, with contemporary critics who questioned the accusations and the use of torture.

• Chapters on English literature under James I

  The literature of melancholy, including Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the melancholic heroes of the Jacobean stage.