The Age of Reason Begins

Volume VII of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization — covering Europe from 1558 to 1648, including the reign of Elizabeth I, the careers of Bacon, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, the Thirty Years War, and Descartes.

Covers the century in which medieval Christian synthesis broke down and modern secular thought began — the confluence of the Scientific Revolution, Reformation aftermath, and literary Renaissance in a single accessible narrative.