¹ For biographical material I have drawn on Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995: in English as Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998)); A. C. Grayling, Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times (London: The Free Press, 2005); Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). I am particularly grateful to Ian Maclean for his comments on a draft of this Introduction as well as on the draft Explanatory Notes.