The Formation of the Modern Self (Bloomsbury Academic, £85 hardback; Tablet price £76.50) is refreshingly unlike other books on this topic, being less concerned with the results of that formation than with what necessitated it. In the late thirteenth century, says Felix Ó Murchadha, reason began to be severed from faith until humans no longer fitted into a meaningful cosmos. He discusses how six seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, including Montaigne, Spinoza and Kant, responded to “the crisis of Christendom” by re-mapping the notions of grace, salvation, freedom and happiness, and of human nature itself. But their respective solutions never quite become clear. Murchadha’s broadbrush theorising fails to connect with the detail that should illuminate and corroborate it.