Simon Stevin. De la vie civile 1590

Of the writing of the great engineer and mathematician Simon Stevin (Bruges 1548 - The Hague? 1620), it is predominantly his scientific work, striking for its diversity and intention to serve as practical handbooks, which has survived the passage of time. His numerous works, almost all in Dutch, cover areas as diverse as arithmetic and navigation, including computing tables of interest and writing a dialectic designed to enrich the terminology of logic in Flemish. Simon Stevin wrote his Mathematical Memoirs for Prince Maurice of Nassau whom he served for almost thirty years as quartermaster-general of the army of the States-General. This ample body of work includes a short text, the Vita politica. Het burgherlick leven, which is surprising both on account of its subject matter and the way in which it is handled. The work, although strongly influenced by the circumstances of the time, is a kind of "artwork in miniature" of political life and offers the unique case of an engineer's thoughts on citizenship at the end of the 16th century. His success did not wane at all during the17th century, the work being reissued no fewer than five times. Here, translated into French for the first time, the Vita politica. Het burgherlick leven includes a series of studies, each of which covers a major aspect of Stevin's work, which explain the intellectual and historical context in which this treatise on civilian life was written.