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Descartes was a product of a transitional period which has been usually characterized as an age of "general crisis'. He was born during "the crisis of the 1590s' and in France, where the "crisis' was particularly deep. It is reported that in 1592, four years before he was born, a Spanish writer declared: "England without God, Germany in schism, Flanders in rebellion, France with all these together."¹ In fact, France in the latter half of the sixteenth century suffered successive brutal religious wars up to 1598, the year in which the Edict of Nantes was promulgated by Henri IV, a king newly converted to Catholicism. And it was at a Jesuit college which Henri IV had the Jesuits establish that Descartes was educated. Descartes's later career was marked by the Thirty Years' War, which continued from 1618 to 1648. The period of the Thirty Years' War is characterized as an age of the decline of the Catholic states of Spain and of the rise of the Protestant states of England and the Netherlands, which began to sweep over the seas of the world. The beginning part of the "General Introduction" by the editor of The New Cambridge Modern History, a collection of essays discussing this age synthetically, characterizes this period: "Undeniably the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe (or for that matter in China and to a lesser extent India) was an eventful period, full of conflicts."²

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1225-5_11

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