Peter Burke (born 1937) is a British cultural and intellectual historian, emeritus professor at Cambridge, known for bringing social science methods into historical analysis. His work consistently asks how knowledge is produced, organized, and distributed — who gets to be a scholar, what counts as learning, and how institutions shape what gets known.
His most sustained contribution to intellectual history is probably his two-volume A Social History of Knowledge (2000, 2012), which traces the sociology of knowledge production from Gutenberg to the digital age. The Polymath (2020) is a companion study that uses five centuries of biographical data — 500 figures — to chart the rise and fall of the generalist intellectual tradition in the West.
Burke's method is characteristically sociological: he is less interested in the genius of individual polymaths than in the social and institutional conditions that made polymathy possible, rewarded, or penalized at different historical moments. Courts, salons, universities, and journals are the real actors in his narrative; figures like Leonardo-da-Vinci and Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz are specimens in a larger ecological study.