Origins

• Social destabilization
  • Capitalism and its Effects
  • Print Culture and Intellectual Authority
  • Morality after the Colombian Encounter
• Political change
  • The New Monarchies
  • Aristocrats v. Bureaucrats; Birth v. Wealth
• Religious turmoil
  • Which Christianity? Which Church?
  • Christianity in Global Context
• Intellectual Upheaval
  • Which center? Which horizon?

Responses

• Philosophical
  • Skepticism
    • The Ancient Skeptics
      • Pyrrho of Elis (360-275 BC), "Pyrrhonianism"
      • Sextus Empiricus
        • Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonianism)(c. 200 AD)
    • The Skeptical Revival of the Renaissance
      • Humanism, Anti-Scholasticism
      • Skepticism v. Fideism, Skepticism v. Nihilism
      • Whence authority?
    • Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
      • Biography
      • Essais (1575)
  • Libertinism and Neo-Paganism
    • Giordano Bruno (1548-1600): Major Works
      • Influences: Ficino, Hermeticism, Magic and Neo-Platonism
      • A Wandering Scholar: Skepticism, Criticism, and Freethought
      • Philosophy: Monism, Pantheism, Infinitism, Materialism, Paganism
      • Executed in Rome per order of the Inquistion (1600)
    • Epicureanism
      • Epicurus (341-270 BC)
        • Atomism, mechanical determinism, atheism, hedonism
      • Renaissance Epicureanism: Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655)
• Political
  • Competing Notions of Christian Community
    • Catholic and Protestant, Monarchical & Republican
  • Secular Alternatives
    • Absolutism
      • Machiavelli again: Fortuna, Classical Monarchy, & Modern Monarchy
      • The New Theory of Absolutism
        • Jean Bodin (1530-1596)
          • Biography
          • Six Books on the Commowealth (République) (French 1577; Latin 1586)
      • Theory of the Divine Right of Kings
    • The Republic of Letters and Civil Society
      • Stoicism and the Independent Scholar
        • Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Pereisc (1580-1637)
        • Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653)
      • Aristocratic Libertinism
        • François La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
    • Machaivelli's The Prince and "Les Politiques"