In 1510, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I faced a question that had little to do with armies. A converted Jew named Johannes Pfefferkorn had persuaded him to order the confiscation and burning of Jewish books throughout the empire, and the emperor asked a few learned men whether this was wise. One of them was a lawyer from the German town of Pforzheim, who knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and who answered that the books should be preserved. That scholar was Johannes Reuchlin. His reply began one of the great quarrels of the Renaissance, and the roots of his courage lay in a small book on a single name. A Humanist Who Learned Hebrew Reuchlin was born in Pforzheim in 1455. He studied in Paris, Basel, Orléans and Poitiers, and he learned Greek from some of the best teachers of his day. He became a lawyer and served the Count of Württemberg on diplomatic journeys to Italy. There he met the circle of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Florence, scholars who believed ...

In 1679, a Jesuit scholar in Rome published a large illustrated book to answer a question that seemed simple: could the Tower of Babel really have reached the heavens? Athanasius Kircher, then seventy-seven years old, did not answer with a sermon. He answered with arithmetic. The book, called Turris Babel , calculated the size of such a tower, the number of bricks needed and the weight it would have to bear. His conclusion was that the work could never have been completed, and that the earth itself would have been thrown off balance by the load. It is a strange and fascinating example of a mind that tried to measure a myth. The Story in Genesis The tale occupies only nine verses in the Book of Genesis (11:1-9). The whole earth had one language and one speech. The people migrated to a plain in the land of Shinar and said: "Let us build a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves." God came down to see the city and the tower, and h...