The Bloomsbury Handbook of Spinoza
Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers, Jeroen M. M. van de Venupon historical documents 1
1 Prologue: Spinoza’s family and early upbringing 2
2 Birth and early childhood in the ‘Jerusalem of the North’ 5
3 Formal education and intellectual training 7
4 Mercator sapiens, expulsion and earliest writings 14
5 Outside the walls of Leiden Academia 18
6 Composing an adumbration of Descartes, expanding the scholarly network 23
7 A writing project on ‘angels, prophecy and miracles’, practitioner of optics
and mechanics 27
8 Homo audax 33
9 ‘A pestilent book from Hamburg called Tractatus Theologo-Politicus’ 37
10 A banned clandestine author 43
11 Completing the five-part Ethica 48
12 Fatal disease, death and burial 53
13 Estate and legacy 55
14 Epilogue. Posthumous writings, early reactions, ban and index 60
Printed editions and translations of Spinoza’s writings prior to 1800 68
2 Influences 73
Introduction 73
Antiquity 76
The Stoa 78
The Latin Middle Ages 80
Jewish philosophical influences: Maimonides, Crescas, Abrabanel,
Menasseh ben Israel, Kabbalah, Delmedigo 86
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527) 94
Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) 96
Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) 98
Burgersdijk, Franck Pieterszoon (1590–1635) 100
Descartes, René (1596–1650) 102
Enden, Franciscus Van den (1602–74) 106
Heereboord, Adriaan (1614–61) 109
De la Court, Pieter (1618–85) and Johan (1622–60) 111