Given the self-reported originality of The New Science from Vico’s comments on previous scholarship, it would seem to make it a curious point of departure for an inquiry into the emergence of modernity. For Vico, everything stated in The New Science arrived fully formed and was derived from nothing other than his own reason and the providence of God. Given his effort to radically depart from existing philosophy and emerging natural science, and the relative obscurity of his work at the time and since, it is challenging to place Vico within traditional intellectual history. Indeed, his faith in divine providence and his turn away from the rise of subject centered rationality emerging elsewhere on the continent makes The New Science at once a reiteration of classical knowledge and a radical reformulation of it. Thus scholars staking claims to traditional categories of intellectual history are faces with a quandary; is Vico the last of the ancients, a different sort of modern, or a man ahead of his time?