The essays selected here for translation derive largely from Thomasius's work on Staatskirchenrecht, or the political jurisprudence of church law. These works, originating as disputations, theses, and pamphlets, were direct interventions in the unresolved issue of the political role of religion in Brandenburg-Prussia, a state in which a Calvinist dynasty ruled over a largely Lutheran population and nobility as well as a significant Catholic minority. In mandating limited religious toleration within the German states, the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) also provided the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia with a way of keeping the powerful Lutheran church in check by guaranteeing a degree of religious freedom to non-Lutherans and thereby detaching the state from the most powerful territorial church. Thomasius's writings on church-state relations, many of them critical of the civil claims made by Lutheran theologians, are a direct response to this state of affairs. At the same time, owing to the depth of intellectual resources at his disposal, these works constitute a major contribution to the broader discussion of the relation between the religious and political spheres.

Samuel Pufendorf was a pivotal figure in the early German Enlightenment. His version of voluntarist natural law theory had a major influence both on the European continent and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, particularly Scotland and America. Pufendorf's An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe (1682) became one of his most famous and widely reprinted works. It went through multiple editions during the eighteenth century, but its impact has largely been forgotten. Pufendorf's histories exhibited the core notions of his natural law theory by describing the development and current, reciprocal relations of individual states as collective social agents engaged in securing their own and, thus, their members' interests, including self-preservation. Hence, they essentially functioned as vehicles for philosophical demonstration or justification. Moreover, by emphasizing empirical details and legitimating (in principle) a de facto politics of interest, the histories appealed strongly to the emerging nation-states of early modern Europe, which sought ratification of their external and internal actions, policies, and pedagogies. Pufendorf based his accounts on each country's own historians and took care to describe its position from its own current and historical perspectives. It was an appealing approach to political history, judging from the long and diverse publishing record of the work. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of international law and the development of historiography during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It makes available to contemporary scholars and students a carefully edited, helpfully annotated, and historically situated English version of one of Pufendorf's most popular and influential works. Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) was one of the most important figures in early-modern political thought. An exact contemporary of Locke and Spinoza, he transformed the natural law theories of Grotius and Hobbes, developed striking ideas of toleration and of the relationship between church and state, and wrote extensive political histories and analyses of the constitution of the German empire. Jodocus Crull (d. 1713/14) was a German émigré to England, a medical man, and a translator and writer. Michael J. Seidler is Professor of Philosophy at Western Kentucky University. Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.

Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends. The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite. As ever, Peter Burke presents a breath-taking range of scholarship in prose of exemplary clarity and accessibility. This highly anticipated second volume will be essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.