The Age of Genius: the seventeenth century and the birth of the modern mind
A. C. Grayling

This intellectual history of Europe in the seventeenth century – which Professor Grayling describes as “the gestation period of the modern mind” – gets off to a lively start. This was the moment, he argues, that scientific and political “enquiry began to enjoy increasing freedom from the heavy constraints of both religious orthodoxy and magical thinking”. Witness the fact that early on in the century, Shakespeare could “rely on the beliefs of his audience” to see Macbeth’s act of regicide as a crime against eternal order, whereas by its midpoint the people had so “rejected … the idea of the sacred nature of kingship” that crowds could ­assemble in Whitehall to watch the beheading of Charles I.