The present volume re-evaluates the role that religious confession played in the development and understanding of the sciences and medicine in the sixteenth century. It presents the results of an international, interdisciplinary conference held in Wittenberg in December 1998. Scholars from Israel, Italy, Great Britain and Germany discussed the ways in which religious conviction and the development of the natural sciences and medicine influenced each other in the sixteenth century. Contrary to the still widespread view that relations between religion and the sciences at the dawn of the...

The founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums had a keen interest in Jewish erudition during the Renaissance, especially in Italy. Leopold Zunz, for example, regarded the work of Azaria de' Rossi as the point of departure for the historical-critical method upon which he based his "Science of Judaism." In the past two centuries, Jewish writings from the Renaissance have been edited and reinterpreted. In the areas of historiography, philosophy and Kabbala, we have important new findings from research conducted in recent years. For a short time now, scholars active in the field of Judaic...