VERITRACE

Traces de la Verité

The reappropriation of ancient wisdom in early modern natural philosophy

Welcome to VERITRACE!

Traces de la Verité, aka VERITRACE, is an ERC-funded project led by Prof. Dr. Cornelis J. Schilt, research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

VERITRACE addresses the influence of ancient wisdom writings on the development of early modern natural philosophy. During the Renaissance, works such as the Chaldean Oracles, the Sibylline Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Orphic Hymns were rediscovered and reappropriated into a prisca sapientia, a perennial tradition that considered these writings to contain truths about God, mankind, and the cosmos. Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, foundational for the development of modern science, all ascribed to this tradition, and with them many others; yet so far no comprehensive account exist of exactly what they took from these ancient wisdom writings and how the idea of a perennial truth influenced their knowledge-making.

VERITRACE focuses on the influence of the Renaissance prisca sapientia on early modern natural philosophy in its broadest sense by deploying bespoke techniques for distant reading on a large corpus of early modern printed works. It traces how the most prominent ancient wisdom writings returned in the natural philosophical discourse, what exactly natural philosophers took from these writings, and how these writings functioned in the economy of early modern science. Moreover, it traces the debate surrounding these ancient wisdom texts and the supposed truths contained therein throughout early modern Europe, differentiating between the various sentiments with which these texts were perceived, read, and discussed. As such, VERITRACE fills in a major lacuna in our understanding of the emergence and development of early modern science, focussing not on isolated episodes but covering the overall dissemination and influence of the ancient wisdom tradition, while making use of state-of-the-art digital techniques adapted for an early modern environment.

What exactly did early modern natural philosophers take from these ancient wisdom writings, and from the idea that knowledge is not new, but old? This is what VERITRACE seeks out to discover.

A detailed project description can be downloaded here (PDF, 590KB).

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VERITRACE

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Our Team

Our Team

Cornelis J. (Kees-Jan) Schilt

Principal Investigator (PI), VERITRACE;
Research Professor (History and Philosophy of Knowledge)

Cornelis J. (Kees-Jan) Schilt is a Research Professor in history and philosophy of knowledge at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Principal Investigator (PI) for VERITRACE. He is fascinated by how we seek to understand the world around and within us, and how we have done so since the dawn of time. His research focusses on historic concepts of ontology and epistemology, most notably in early modern science, philosophy, theology and historiography, and in particular on the life and writings of Isaac Newton. He is also intrigued by the questions that modern quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence pose, the science-religion debates of the past and present, and the interaction between Eastern and Western knowledge.

Eszter Kovács

Postdoctoral Fellow (Philosophy)

Eszter Kovács is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy for the ERC-StG project VERITRACE. She is affiliated with the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science within the Department of History, Archaeology, Arts, Philosophy and Ethics (HARP) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Eszter obtained her PhD in 2008 in French literature from the University of Szeged and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (under joint supervision). Her thesis, entitled La Critique du voyage dans la pensée de Diderot, was published in 2015 in a revised version. In 2018, she started a second PhD in philosophy, devoted to early modern female conceptions of freedom. Her current interests include early modern female philosophers on knowledge, early modern metaphysical and scientific terminology, linguistic equivalence and non-equivalence in early modern translation of science.

Jeffrey Wolf

Postdoctoral Fellow (Digital Humanities)

Jeffrey Wolf is a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities for the ERC-StG project VERITRACE. He is affiliated with the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science within the Department of History, Archaeology, Arts, Philosophy and Ethics (HARP) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Jeff obtained his PhD in the history of medicine from the University of Edinburgh, with a PhD thesis on the Scottish Enlightenment physician, Dr. William Cullen (1710-1790). Before that, he studied philosophy at Princeton University and the philosophy and history of science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught web development to business school students at Northwestern University, and, along with his historical and philosophical interests, is currently immersed in Python, data analytics, machine learning, and full-stack web development.

Nicolò Cantoni

PhD Student

Nicolò Cantoni is a PhD student in Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Cornelis J. (Kees-Jan) Schilt and member of the ERC-StG project VERITRACE. Attracted by the multifaceted relationships between philosophy, science and the Abrahamic religions, he devotes his research to the study of magic, alchemy and kabbalah between the Renaissance and the early modern era as peculiar subsets of utopian thinking. In particular, he is fascinated by the controversies of orthodoxy and heresy arising from the adoption of pagan and Jewish ideas within a Christian Catholic context. He has pursued a double education, in philosophy (University of Pavia) and screenwriting (Centro Italiano di Studi Superiori per la Formazione e l’Aggiornamento in Giornalismo Radiotelevisivo).

Demetrios Paraschos

PhD Student

Demetrios Paraschos is a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and member of the ERC-StG project VERITRACE. He earned a BA in Philology, specialising in Classics, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an MA in Classics and Ancient Civilizations at Leiden University. His academic interests are deeply rooted in the realm of ancient philosophy, with a primary focus on Stoicism and Platonism. He is fervently engaged in exploring reception and intertextuality, the ways antiquity influenced the next generations of thinkers, mainly the Renaissance and the Early Modern Era. Finally, the spiritual landscape of antiquity, with its cults, syncretism, and the birth of new religions, appeals to his interests, as the boundaries of philosophy with religion and theology were obscure and overlapping before the Modern Era.

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Research Outputs

Research Outputs

PUBLICATIONS

2026 (forthcoming)

N. Cantoni, D. Paraschos, “Treading the Path of Prisca Sapientia: Ficino’s Christian Platonic Allure for Pagan Magic”, Society and Politics, ISSN (print): 1843-1348 ISSN (online): 2067-7812.

Kovács, E., Paraschos, D., “The Notion of Fire in the Chaldean Oracles: Classical and Innovative Methods of Lexical Analysis for Mapping Intertextuality”, Prisca sapientia special issue, Society and Politics, ISSN (print): 1843-1348 ISSN (online): 2067-7812.

Kovács, E., “Diderot filozófiatörténeti Enciklopédia-szócikkei és a prisca sapientia” [Diderot and prisca sapientia: entries in the history of philosophy in the Encyclopédie], in Aradi, Cs., Kovács, K., Székesi, D. (eds.), Enciklopédikus tudásformák a hosszú 18. században [Encyclopaedical forms of knowledge in the long 18thcentury], Szeged, JATEPress (article in Hungarian with Latin – French comparative tables).

Wolf, Jeffrey. “From Data Acquisition to Latent Semantic Analysis: Developing VERITRACE’s Computational Approach to Tracing the Influence of Ancient Wisdom in Early Modern Philosophy.” Society and Politics. Vol. 18, Issue No. 1 (35). April 2024 (forthcoming 2026: this is a pre-dated issue).

2025

Wolf, Jeffrey. Forthcoming. “Recursive Reflections: Using LLMs to Discuss LLMs in HPSS Research,” in Large Language Models for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science. Reflections from a Field in Motion, eds. Arno Simons, Adrian Wüthrich, Michael Zichert, and Gerd Graßhoff (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript, 2025), XX-XXX. DOI:

Wolf, Jeffrey. Forthcoming. “LLMs and Multilingual Historical Corpora in the VERITRACE project: Reflections from the Berlin Workshop,” in Large Language Models for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science. Reflections from a Field in Motion, eds. Arno Simons, Adrian Wüthrich, Michael Zichert, and Gerd Graßhoff (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript, 2025), XX-XXX. DOI:

Schilt, Cornelis J., Nicolò Cantoni, Eszter Kovács, Demetrios Paraschos, and Jeffrey Wolf. “From Ancient Wisdom to Computational Humanities: Finding Traces of Truth in a Sea of Early Modern Data.” The Project Repository Journal. Vol. 23 (April 2025). pp.92-95. https://doi.org/10.54050/ PRJ23271.

2024

Wolf, Jeffrey C., Nicolò Cantoni, Eszter Kovács, Demetrios Paraschos, and Cornelis J. Schilt. “The Challenges of Multilingualism in the Search for Ancient Wisdom: A Case Study of VERITRACE’s Text Matching Tool.” Proceedings of the 4 th Humanities-Centred AI (CHAI) Workshop at the 47th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, September 23, 2024, Würzburg, Germany. Published online 2024-10-30 (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073): https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3814/paper1.pdf

Schilt, Cornelis J., Nicolò Cantoni, Eszter Kovács, Demetrios Paraschos, and Jeffrey Wolf. “How Ancient Wisdom Shaped the Development of Modern Science.” The Project Repository Journal. Vol. 19 (February 2024). pp.12-15. https://doi.org/10.54050/PRJ1921280.

CONFERENCE EVENTS

2025

Kovács, E., “Intertextes dans les débats autour de la prisca sapientia: entre commentaire érudite et approche numérique”, Le texte de l’autre. Dialogue interdisciplinaire autour de l’intertextualité et le discours rapporté, Paris, 01, July 2025.

Cantoni, N., “Ancient Wisdom Utopianism: Esoteric Traditions in Early Modern Utopian Thought”, ESSWE 10 – European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, Vilnius, 28 June 2025. 

Kovács, E., “Diderot filozófiatörténeti Enciklopédia-szócikkei és a prisca sapientia” [“Diderot and prisca sapientia: entries in the history of philosophy in the Encyclopédie”], Enciklopédikus tudásformák a hosszú 18. században [Encyclopaedical forms of knowledge in the long 18th century), Szeged (Hungary), 17 May 2025.

Wolf, Jeffrey. Poster. “Semantic Shift in the VERITRACE Project: Choosing a Diachronic Embeddings Model for Textual Similarity.” BERLIN INSTITUTE FOR THE FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING AND DATA (BIFOLD): AI-BASED METHODS FOR THE HUMANITIES (SEPTEMBER 23-24, 2025). BERLIN, GERMANY (EINSTEIN CENTRE DIGITAL FUTURE)

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short paper. “Computational Intellectual History? Tracing the Influe of the Ancient Wisdom Tradition using the Text Matching Tools of the VERITRACE project.” DH2025. BUILDING ACCESS AND ACCESSIBILITY, OPEN SCIENCE TO ALL CITIZENS (JULY 14-18, 2025). LISBON, PORTUGAL (UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA).

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short paper. “Layouts Galore: A Multilingual, Historical OCR Pipeline Analysis for Early Modern Printed Books, as part of the VERITRACE project.” DIGITAL HUMANITIES BENELUX 2025 (JUNE 3-6, 2025). AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS (VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT, AMSTERDAM).

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short Paper. ““Towards Computational HPSS: Tracing the Influence of the Ancient Wisdom Tradition on Early Modern Science using the LLM-powered Semantic Matching Tool of the VERITRACE project.” LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS FOR THE HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE (WORKSHOP) (APRIL 2-4, 2025). BERLIN, GERMANY (TU BERLIN)

2024

Kovács, E., “L’ancienne sagesse et la naissance des sciences modernes: constitution des corpus à plusieurs niveaux,” ConCorDiaL 2024: Constitution de Corpus en Diachronie Longue – Entre tradition philologique et analyse quantitative, Lyon, 07 November 2024.

Cantoni, N., “Scientific progress or Edenic restoration? The utopian vision of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis”, 11th Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Science, Technology, Humanity, and the Earth, Barcelona, Barcelona, 05 September 2024.

Kovács, E., “Named Entity Recognition for ancient wisdom texts”, 11th Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Science, Technology, Humanity, and the Earth, Barcelona, 05 September 2024.

Cantoni, N., “The Sibylline Oracles in VERITRACE’s Close Reading Corpus”, Scientiae 11 – Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, Brussels, 12 June 2024.

Kovács, E., “Anne Conway and ancient wisdom”, Scientiae 11 – Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, Brussels, 12 June 2024.

Wolf, Jeffrey. “The Challenges of Multilingualism in the Search for Ancient Wisdom: A Case Study of VERITRACE’s Text Matching Tool.” 4 TH HUMANITIES-CENTRED AI (CHAI) WORKSHOP AT THE 47TH GERMAN CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (SEPTEMBER 23, 2024). WÜRZBURG, GERMANY (JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT WÜRZBURG)

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short paper. “New Tech in Old Wineskins: Text Matching, Semantic Analysis, and the Search for Ancient Wisdom.” Part of the VERITRACE panel symposium. EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 2024: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, HUMANITY, AND THE EARTH (SEPTEMBER 4-7, 2024). BARCELONA, SPAIN (CAMPUS DE LA CIUTADELLA, UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA)

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short paper. “From Keyword Search to Latent Semantic Analysis: The Digital Tools of the VERITRACE Project.” Part of the VERITRACE panel. SCIENTIAE 2024: THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS (JUNE 11-14, 2024). BRUSSELS, BELGIUM (ROYAL FLEMISH ACADEMY OF BELGIUM FOR SCIENCE AND THE ARTS)

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short paper. “Searching ‘Ancient’ Wisdom Using New Tools: The Challenges of Connecting and Integrating Multi-linguistic, Interdisciplinary Data in the VERITRACE Project.” DIGITAL HUMANITIES BENELUX 2024. BREAKING SILOS, CONNECTING DATA: ADVANCING INTEGRATION AND COLLABORATION IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES (JUNE 5-7, 2024). LEUVEN, BELGIUM (IRISH COLLEGE)

WORKSHOPS

2025

Cantoni, N., “Inside VERITRACE: Introducing the Project and Its Close Reading Corpus”, TOME (https://tome.flu.cas.cz/tome-project-4/)  – VERITRACE joint Workshop, Plzen, 27 May 2025.

Kovács, E., Prisca intertexts: ancient wisdom fragments in early modern works, TOME – VERITRACE joint Workshop, Plzen, 27 May 2025.

Wolf, Jeffrey. Short Paper. “Developing the VERITRACE Research Tool: Challenges and Opportunities.” VERITRACE-TOME JOINT PROJECT WORKSHOP (MAY 25-28, 2025). PLZEN, CZECHIA (HOTEL PURKMISTR).

Cantoni, N., “A Glimpse Into VERITRACE’s Close Reading Corpus”, VERITRACE Stavelot workshop II, Stavelot, 5 February 2025.

Kovács, E., “Veritrace linguistic approaches”, Veritrace Stavelot Workshop II, 5 February 2025.

2024

Cantoni, N., The Redemptive Utopia of Prisca Sapientia”, ESSWE thesis workshop, Ascona, 30 September 2024. 

2023

Cantoni, N., “The Rediscovery of Prisca Sapientia in the Italian Renaissance”, presented at ALO Research Day 3, Ghent, 09 November 2023.  

Kovács, E., “Ancient Wisdom in France: New Perspectives”, presented at ALO Research Day 3, Ghent, 09 November 2023.

ONLINE / DIGITAL

2026 (forthcoming)

Wolf, Jeffrey. Almanak: A native MacOS app that provides an end-to-end digitizaton studio, from an input document (typically a PDF or folder of images) to a final, accurate transcription, with a sophisticated markdown-based annotation system on top. From preprocessing the images, to layout analysis, to OCR, and then transcription, It allows the user to choose any locally-installed Ollama LLM, or Apple’s native Vision framework, to perform OCR or layout analysis on the images and to compare the results.

2025

Wolf, Jeffrey. Proso: A native MacOS app that functions as a biographical research tool. It is designed to streamline biographical research by accessing modern authority control systems (VIAF, LOC, Wikidata) and aggregating narrative biographical content from multiple authoritative sources (Wikisource, Wikipedia, Deutsche Biographie, BnF). The user types a name, or a list of names, and the app helps them choose the proper name authority and automatically downloads the biographical data.

Wolf, Jeffrey. Open-NotebookLM-Ollama (https://github.com/jeffcwolf/open-notebooklm-ollama): This is a local, privacy-focused fork (written in Python) of open-notebooklm that generates engaging podcast-style conversations from the user’s documents using Ollama instead of paid APIs. It contains some new, additional features, including local LLM Support, Focus Areas, Deep Discussion Mode, and Extended Dialogues

Wolf, Jeffrey. VERITRACE research platform (https://research.veritrace.eu): A Flask-based web application written in Python and JavaScript, with Elasticsearch backend. Sentence-level vector embeddings are used for the Text Matching tool. The platform allows the user to conduct sophisticated searches across a 413,000+ corpus of digital texts written in 6 languages over more than 200 years.

2024

Wolf, Jeffrey. Facet Manager (https://github.com/jeffcwolf/facet-manager): This OpenRefine extension (written in Java and JavaScript) provides the user the ability to import and export Facets to/from an OpenRefine project, bypassing the limited built-in Permalink functionality.

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En faisant remarquer ces traces de la verité dans les anciens…on tireroit l’or de la boue, le diamant de sa mine et la lumiere des tenebres; et ce seroit, en effect, perennis quaedam Philosophia. On peut meme dire, qu’on y remarqueroit quelque progrès dans les connoissances.

-Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714)

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