A provocative exploration of intellectual exchange across four centuries of European history by the author of When the World Spoke French

In this fascinating study, preeminent historian Marc Fumaroli reveals how an imagined republic of ideas and interchange fostered the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. He follows exchanges among Petrarch, Erasmus, Descartes, Montaigne, and others from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, through revolutions in culture and society. Via revealing portraits and analysis, Fumaroli traces intellectual currents engaged with the core question of how to live a moral lifeand argues that these men of letters provide an example of the exchange of knowledge and ideas that is worthy of emulation in our own time. Combining scholarship, wit, and reverence, this thoughtprovoking volume represents the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship.