Despite his fame Paracelsus remains an illusive character. As this volume points out it is somewhat of a paradox that the fascination with Paracelsus and his ideas has remained so widespread when it is born in mind that it is far from clear what exactly he contributed to medicine and natural philosophy. But perhaps it is exactly this enigma which through the ages has made Paracelsus so attractive to such a variety of people who all want to claim him as an advocate for their particular ideas.
The first section of this book deals with the historiography surrounding Paracelsus and...

This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance. The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and...

Marsilius of Inghen, master of the Universities of Paris (1362-1378) and Heidelberg (1386-1396), is the author of a number of highly successful treatises on logic and natural philosophy which were read at many Late Medieval and Early Modern universities. The fruit of his mature thinking is a monumental commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which he published shortly before his death in 1396. This huge piece of writing is now being critically edited for the first time by an international team of specialists. The first volume provides a discussion of the nature of theology and deals...

This collection of studies in the history of political thought from late antiquity to the early-eighteenth century ranges broadly across themes of kingship, political theology, constitutional ideas, natural-law thinking and consent theory. The studies are linked together by three shared characteristics. First, all of them explore the continuities that existed during those centuries between legal/political thinking and theology. Second, nearly all of them transgress the sharp dividing line traditionally drawn between the "medieval" and the " modern" which did so much in the past to distort our...

This study deals with Hugo Grotius' famous apologetic work De veritate religionis christianae, the Latin version of a Dutch poem which he wrote in 1620 while imprisoned in Loevestein, entitled Bewijs van den waren godsdienst. The first part of this book examines the genesis of the work and the development of the text. The middle sections give an analysis of the motives that led Grotius to write this work and of the sources he most probably used. The final chapters examine the notes that Grotius added to his work in 1640 and the reception of the work in the author's lifetime. The...