Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science selected by Richard Davenport-Hines as a 2016 TLS Book of the Year!

"Dmitri Levitin’s Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of philosophy in England, c.1640–1700 (Cambridge) has prodigious virtuosity. It argues that historians of ideas are often too remote from institutional history, and provides a vivid, enriching celebration of the continuing vitality in seventeenth-century England of a trans-European culture of scholarly humanism that radiated beyond scholarly communities. There is a far-reaching discussion of dogmatism, learned authority and experimentalism. Levitin identifies the recession of the ideal of the philosopher-theologian as the greatest transformation of seventeenth-century English intellectual culture. He has an exultant joy in his sources, but never loses mastery of them. His avid glee in reading manuscripts and rare treatises, the insatiability of his learning, are enthralling. I recommend the witty mischief hidden in his index. Ancient Wisdom makes most books I have read this year look like bankrupt stock."

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