Peter J. Leithart

In an essay on the chronologer Joseph Scaliger in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 , Anthony Grafton remarks on the work of Gottfried Buchholzer, whom he calls “one of the most serious Protestant chronologers”: He “tabulated . . . . Continue Reading »

Romulus’s use of a 10-month calendar has long been one of the puzzles of early Roman chronology and history. Why would he introduce such time-keeping. The polymathic Guillaume Postel had a theory: “Pretending that he wished to establish a beginning for the year in Mars’s honor, he . . . . Continue Reading »

Procreation, Aristotle said, is like building a house. The carpenter’s role in house-building helps us understand “how the male makes its contribution to generation.” The semen males emit in sexual generation “is not part of the fetation as it develops,” just as a . . . . Continue Reading »

Locke begins the third book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by arguing that knowledge is founded on fairly certain simple ideas that represent sensible qualities. So far, it seems, so Cartesian. But Locke is also aware that the mind freely constructs certain concepts out of the simple . . . . Continue Reading »

It has long been said that virtue is its own reward. This notion is particularly set against any “instrumentalization” of virtue, any notion that virtue is a means to achieve some other end. We are good because it is good to be good, not because being good is rewarded with some other . . . . Continue Reading »

The Reformation is often characterized as an assault on or at least a diminution of the sacraments. At the Trinity House site, I argue the opposing case: The Reformation recovered the sacraments . . . . . Continue Reading »

In the NYTBR , Margo Rabb discusses the frequent experience of disillusionment that readers have when they meet the authors of books they love. When they aren’t perfectly loathsome, writers are often smaller, less witty than the constructed persona of the “author.” But then . . . . Continue Reading »

What’s so special about movies? asks Martin Scorcese in the NYRB . His answer is a mystical one: “Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental—because cinema is created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms, where it’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteen centuries “purists” battled with “mixturists” about language. Purists believed that languages should be purged of foreign influence and, politically, that the people of a realm should speak a single language. Mixturists reveled in the . . . . Continue Reading »

“A team from University of Darmstadt has managed to stop light for an entire minute .” To get a bit of frozen light “they took an opaque crystal and fired lasers into it to disturb the quantum states of the atoms within. By creating two quantum states within those atoms, they were . . . . Continue Reading »