First Published in 1987. Presented as two sections, the first includes three surveys which aim to describe and comment on some of radial changes in the questions historians have been asking about the past and some of the new data, tools and methodology they have developed to answer them. The second is a collection of essays that were originally reflective book reviews and are concerned with the theme of how and why did Western Europe change itself during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries so as to lay the social, economic, scientific, political, ideological and ethical foundations for the rationalist, democratic, individualistic, technological industrialized society in which we now live.