Maria Rosa Antognazza#s pioneering biography provides a unified portrait of this unique thinker and the world from which he came. At the centre of the huge range of Leibniz#s apparently miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza reveals a single master project lending unity to his extraordinarily multifaceted life#s work. Throughout the vicissitudes of his long life, Leibniz tenaciously pursued the dream of a systematic reform and advancement of all the sciences. As well as tracing the threads of continuity that bound these theoretical and practical activities to this all-embracing plan, this illuminating study also traces these threads back into the intellectual traditions of the Holy Roman Empire in which Leibniz lived and throughout the broader intellectual networks that linked him to patrons in countries as distant as Russia and to correspondents as far afield as China. # The first, full-scale intellectual biography of Leibniz in any language # Captures the key facets of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century western European intellectual world # Provides a unified, comprehensive portrait of Leibniz taking fully into account the entire range of his intellectual and practical activities