It is rare to have a scholar with such depth of knowledge in the ancient and vernacular languages of Europe, rarer to have such breadth of knowledge of Western intellectual history, and rarest to have both join forces to produce a work of this staggering erudition. With calm authority and elegant equipoise, Jiani Fan presents to us the grateful readers a masterclass on the genesis of modern intellectual thought. The “mask” that she exposes is that the disenchanted guise of modernity obscures its deep indebtedness to the ancient philosophies of Christianity, Stoicism, and Epicureanism.

Andrew Yeung Bun Hui, Associate Professor of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore, Singapore

The Mask of Philosophy presents a bracingly fresh and wide-ranging reevaluation of the reception of ancient philosophy in France from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment. Delving into a period in which modern authors often seem to either blindly idealize or mercilessly deprecate Greek and Roman philosophers, Jiani Fan moves beyond the surface of such polemics to brilliantly reveal the complex dialectical thought that reshaped attitudes toward antiquity in the modern world. Wearing its formidable erudition lightly, this is a book that will delight and reward all those interested in classical reception, the history of ideas, and early-modern culture and thought.

Larry Norman, Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago, author of The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France