Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment

(Yale University Press) Though the Enlightenment is known as a time of science and reason, this book reveals the extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult. Monod argues that the occult was not discarded in favor of “reason” but was incorporated into new forms of learning, and is still a part of the modern world. Monod is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury College.