Edward Muir's book offers an original and fairly accurate look at the intellectual history of the late Renaissance, built around a specific conflict of cultural, religious, and socio-political regimes in the Padua-Venice-Rome triangle. Muir shows how skeptical university philosophy, Libertarian culture, and early opera not only coexisted, but formed an interconnected environment in which norms of knowledge, publicity, matrimonial practices, and artistic representation changed. The relevance of the research is reflected in the ability to simultaneously maintain a micro-historical density in the analysis of the ideas of Cremonini, Pallavicino, Tarabotti, Busenello and the global thesis on the cultural transformation of the West. Muir does not reduce the Late Renaissance crisis to the "birth of modernity" in the direct sense, suggesting a reconstruction of the stress field, where the old forms of order are still active, but are already losing their monopoly. The book shows that Venetian public culture was not a sphere of free expression as such, but a space of regulated and complex ambivalence, combining secrecy and publicity, skepticism and rhetoric, republican freedom and social violence. The review discusses the book's method, structure, and reasoning, as well as the cultural phenomena it examines in the context of cultural philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of ideas. Special attention is paid to how Muir connects intellectual history with the history of institutions and mediums, in particular the nascent opera, and how convincingly he describes the transition from university practices of knowledge production to the publicity of opera.