Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the "new philosophy" in the mid-seventeenth century.

Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor of philosophy and theology at the Calvinist academy of Herborn, was a man of many facets. A deputy to the famous Synod of Dort and the greatest encyclopaedist of his age, he was also a pioneer of Calvinist millenarianism and a devoted student of astrology, alchemy, Lullism, and the works of Giordano Bruno. This intellectual biography opens up unexpected perspectives on the central European Reformed tradition as a whole and provides an invaluable introduction to many of the central ideas, individuals, and institutions in this neglected area of intellectual...

l. i ALSTED, MEDE ANDTHE BIRTH OFCALVINIST MILLENARIANISM In the past thirty to forty years, the spread and influence of millenarianism within the Protestant world has been traced from the Reformation to the present day by dozens of scholarly studies. ' Medieval historians have lo- ted echoes in the modem world ofeschatological innovations deriving from 2 their period, above all those originating with Joachim of Fiore. Social and political historians, attracted especially by the function of millenarianism as a proto-revolutionary ideology, have focused on its influences at times of acute...