Americans are well acquainted with Thomas Jefferson’s words. The author of the Declaration of Independence left us thousands of written records of his thoughts in legal documents, memoranda, letters, notebooks, and even a fragmentary autobiography. But in his own time, Jefferson’s physical presence—the clothes he wore, the way he spoke, and his mannerisms themselves—conveyed immense amounts about his view of himself, the world, and his new nation’s place in it.

In frequently “dressing down,” for example, Jefferson rejected elaborate codes of the era to express an Enlightenment sensibility that nature, not authority, was the source of knowledge, rights, and justice. At other times, Jefferson would “dress up” to communicate that he was no less advanced than Europeans. And he cultivated a studied quirkiness to express his individualism, another critical aspect of the Enlightenment.

Italian intellectual historian Maurizio Valsania reveals and explores all these aspects of our third president in Jefferson’s Body, a groundbreaking new book from the University of Virginia Press. Valsania, a professor at the University of Turin, stopped by the Miller Center studios to discuss his new work.