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Simon Stevin has recently enjoyed a renewed interest. Long considered as mainly an engineer and a mathematician, he also earned fame for having been military advisor to Stadtholder Maurice of Nassau during almost 20 years. His lasting reputation as a scientist was due to his outstanding theoretical works (in algebra, physics, calculation of interest, linguistics, architecture, music theory, etc.) and to his highly innovative technological achievements in various fields: sluices, mills, fortification, navigation, etc. But new aspects of his work have been brought to light, concerning among others his political thought. The short discourse written in Dutch and published in Leiden in 1590, Vita politica. Het Burgherlick Leven, proves to be a very original political treatise. Stevin here distances himself from both the 'mirrors-for-princes' literary genre and the humanists' claim on a privileged relationship with the supreme political power, asserting instead the capability of any citizen to make a statement on politics. In addition, he deals with the question of civic life as a practical issue.

Simon Stevin has recently enjoyed a renewed interest. Long considered as mainly an engineer and a mathematician, he also earned fame for having been military advisor to Stadtholder Maurice of Nassau during almost 20 years. His lasting reputation as a scientist was due to his outstanding theoretical works (in algebra, physics, calculation of interest, linguistics, architecture, music theory, etc.) and to his highly innovative technological achievements in various fields: sluices, mills, fortification, navigation, etc. But new aspects of his work have been brought to light, concerning among others his political thought. The short discourse written in Dutch and published in Leiden in 1590, Vita politica. Het Burgherlick Leven, proves to be a very original political treatise. Stevin here distances himself from both the 'mirrors-for-princes' literary genre and the humanists' claim on a privileged relationship with the supreme political power, asserting instead the capability of any citizen to make a statement on politics. In addition, he deals with the question of civic life as a practical issue.

The discipline of social history has for many decades focused on the lives of so-called "ordinary" people. Less studied, however, has been the ways in which the perceptions and roles of these individuals changed over time - both in historical theory and practice. In particular, in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century, they were no longer simply ignored, feared, or denigrated by elites: they came to be seen, however cautiously, as having value through their skills and crafts, or in their ability to reason, or even in their contributions to anchoring the stability of the state. It is not accidental that these sorts of practices on the part of ordinary people became valorized more visibly in the English and Dutch contexts. After 1550, the Dutch Revolt cast ordinary people, particularly in urban settings, as participants on either the Catholic Spanish side or among the Dutch rebels and their reformed churches. Meanwhile, the English civil wars of the 1640s did something similar, and also produced a body of theoretical literature on the capacities of ordinary men and even women that became central to Western democratic thinking. In the fascinating array of studies gathered here, we see how the study of these participants' social identities imparts historical texture and enables us to understand early modernity with greater clarity