VI People in Portrait, 48 Hugo Grotius (1583–1645)

Grotius is nowadays essentially remembered as a jurist, particularly in legal and political philosophy, and above all in international law. In his own century he enjoyed much wider fame, not only for his position with regard to religious controversies, but more generally as an outstanding citizen of the Republic of Letters. Richelieu, despite heartily disliking him, still declared him one of the three greatest humanists of his age, a judgment amply borne out by his vast corpus of works spreading well beyond law into various fields such as classical philology,...