Rens Bod (b. 1965) is professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Amsterdam and president of the international Society for the History of Humanities. His previous book A New History of the Humanities. The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford University Press) was translated into seven languages and awarded numerous prizes.
(Bert Bakker, 2010, 520 pages)
Many histories of science have been written, but until Rens Bod came along no one had thought of writing a history of the humanities. We already have historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics and historiography; Bod pulls all these fields together, with many more, in a single coherent account.
(Prometheus, 2019, 488 pages)
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights and may be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles, and the systematic knowledge they form, began at least 40,000 years ago when striped patterns were engraved on mammoth’s bones.
