Audrey Borowski, <i>Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant</i> Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-0-691-26074-7. £30.00 (hardcover).

When I first got serious about a PhD project on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz some decades ago, I quickly realized that I would not be able to understand my materials unless I had a good grasp on how Leibniz's writings mapped onto the chronology of his voyages, places and people of interest, restless correspondences, numerous projects and sequence of employers.Not only did one have to be clear on the theoretical priorities in this timeline, but this chronology had to be multi-linear, following Leibniz's separated but often entangled projects in the realms of the political, economic, theological, philosophical, mathematical and so on.The tools to understand these lineages are a necessity to this field of research.Leibniz in His World offers us a resplendent fulfilment of this necessity.However, one should not expect to gain a deep grasp of Leibniz as a thinker.This is not the goal.In this it differs from Maria Rosa Antognazza's more substantial classic intellectual biography (2011).One might say that Leibniz (like a monad) serves as a node, a point of view, in a sprawling network of interlocked personal, political, social and theoretical relationships.The biography is primarily about this network, but it is told from Leibniz's life insofar as he is the best-known character in this group.Borowski's biography is therefore a complement to Antognazza's -where the latter engages in context to depict the thinker, the former paints the group through the individual.This complementarity is engaging, and offers a more complete picture of Leibniz in, and through, his time.Borowski is an exemplary acolyte of the 'contextualist' methodologies holding sway in the history of ideas of recent decades, which emphasize social and epistolary context as the precondition for understanding.But the cutting edge swings both ways.The attentive portrait of this network is insightful, providing a richer understanding of this period of precarious intellectual entrepreneurs, their rivalries and friendships and their patrons before the establishment of modern academic institutions.This provides a more complete understanding of Leibniz.As Leibniz himself famously complained to his friend Vincent Placcius, 'Qui ni non nisi editis novit, non novit' ('those who only know me through my published writings, do not know me') (A II, 3, N.48, 139).Borowski depicts an aspect of Leibniz of which we are dimly aware but too often ignore in favour of well-polished publications.Yet the splendour of instances does not lead Borowski to offer any substantial connection between context and ideas.How did these episodes of social competition or patronal courtships influence the content of metaphysics, mathematics or ethics?How did Leibniz alter his theological ecumenicalism through relationships with churchmen, princes and ministers?Was his mathematical study only a means to establish credibility with more celebrated philosophers?Whereas the social narrative unfolds with richness, these conceptual connections are conspicuously lacking in the book.