Machiavelli is often characterized as a radical political thinker. This essay doesn’t challenge this view directly, but approaches Machiavelli’s originality through a new lens by considering the role of moderation in his political thought. Drawing upon The Prince, the Discourses and The History of Florence, it treats moderation as a binding…[Read more]

Review of Faces of Moderation: The art of Balance in an age of Extremes by Aurelian Craiutu, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

Review of Les Forces de la modération. Ligne politique ou accommodements raisonnés dans les crises politico-religieuses européennes (XVIe–XIXe siecle). Edited by Olivier Andurand and Albane Pialoux. (Pour une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe, 13.) Pp. x + 400. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2020

Recent scholarship has sought to reinterpret the French biblical scholar Richard Simon, viewing him less as the unwitting participant in an agenda of radical secularisation, and more as the culmination of centuries of humanistic learning. This article repositions this rehabilitated Simon within the contested theological landscape of late…[Read more]

This article reconstructs the biography of a little-known Italian priest, Francesco Bellisomi (1663–1741), in order to trace the intellectual and political dimensions of religious reformism in early eighteenth-century Europe. Its primary objective is to demonstrate the causal relationships between three trends: firstly, pietistic spiritual r…[Read more]

Historians of scholarship and intellectual historians have recently been paying more attention to the social and epistemic conditioning of scholarly production. Informed by the history of science, such scholarship has shed light upon how knowledge production changed over time, and how its ‘legislation’, ‘administration’, and ‘instit…[Read more]