This talk presented the ERC project “VERITRACE – Traces de la Verité. The reappropriation of ancient wisdom in early modern natural philosophy“.

VERITRACE addresses the influence of ancient wisdom writings on the development of early modern natural philosophy. During the Renaissance, works such as the Chaldean Oracles, the Sibylline Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Orphic Hymns were rediscovered and reappropriated into a prisca sapientia, a perennial tradition that considered these writings to contain truths about God, mankind, and the cosmos. Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, foundational for the development of modern science, all ascribed to this tradition, and with them many others; yet so far no comprehensive account exist of exactly what they took from these ancient wisdom writings and how the idea of a perennial truth influenced their knowledge-making.

11 September 2024, FCUL