The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century

With this book I bring to a close the studies begun in The Dignity of Man. Since the present work is a thematic and chronological extension of if not precisely a sequel to its predecessor a common title might have served for both; however here my subject is the deterioration or at least the radical mutation of the idea whose development I earlier tried to trace. More specifically I am here concerned with the traditional and the emerging concepts of truth--theological scientific political and other--whose collision generated such heat and even such light in the age of Milton. I have tried to describe at least in broad terms the meshing of those inherited and newly formulated values which in my judgment gives the period its peculiar poignancy and relevance for the modern world. Between the birth and death of Milton English thought underwent a transformation whose consequences we perhaps do not fully understand even now. Yet in attempting to seek out the origins of this transformation in the early Renaissance and to sketch its progress through the earlier seventeenth century I have sought to indicate the intellectual and emotional pressures which shaped mens conception of truth and of their capacity to attain it and to suggest some of the consequences for literature. --from the Preface Herschel C. Baker (b. 1914) taught at Harvard University. Among his publications are The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea and The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography.