This volume documents the role of creational theology in discussions of natural philosophy, medicine and technology from the Hellenistic period to the early twentieth century. Four principal themes are the comprehensibility of the world, the unity of heaven and earth, the relative autonomy of nature, and the ministry of healing.
Successive chapters focus on Greco-Roman science, medieval Aristotelianism, early modern science, the heritage of Isaac Newton, and post-Newtonian mechanics.
The volume will interest historians of science and historians of the idea of creation. It simultaneously...

This volume is a cultural analysis of the home during the Christian centuries, when home was believed to be heaven. It investigates the traditional belief in the divine indwelling - but by reversing the history of doctrine to venture doctrine as history. Analysis proceeds not by speculation on faculties of the soul but by research on actualities of housing. What did believers experience about habitat? its relationships? its rooms? The book examines four cultural constructs of dwelling: the inn, the sanctuary, the villa, and the castle. Its focus is the hearth as the familial place. A lesson...

This volume is the fruit of the colloquium "Les Pays-Bas, carrefour de la tolerance aux Temps Modernes", held in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in 1994. Toleration in the strict sense of the word was very much against the grain of sixteenth-century European history. This volume charts the emergence and vicissitudes of the concept of tolerance and its practical implications in the Dutch Republic, from the revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. The various contributions, all by distinguished scholars, address such issues as Erasmus' views on...

By 1300 theologians had established a consensus position concerning predestination stating that God predestines without regard to human causes, but reprobates with regard to sin. In the fourteenth Century this consensus was shattered, first by those arguing that God also predestines on account of human causes, and then by those who asserted that God does neither with regard for human causes.
The first part of the book examines the theology of Peter Aureol, who first broke with the consensus position on predestination. The second part traces the impact of his theology on late Medieval...

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...

Reform is one of the most significant themes, spiritual and intellectual, of the Middle Ages; and it has both institutional and individual dimensions. The Reformation crisis led to further variations on this crucial theme. This volume examines the theme of Reform from a variety of viewpoints while covering more than four centuries. Some contributions look at Apocalyptic dimensions in writings on reform. Another focuses on the influence of Gerhart Ladner on the study of reforming themes and reform movements. These articles will be useful for the study of intellectual history, ecclesiastical...

The religious history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestantism was marked by a twofold movement. On the one hand there were attempts to consolidate and, if necessary, to reaffirm the heritage of the Reformation; on the other hand, we meet a growing critical evaluation of the legacy of mainstream orthodox thought, which could lead to a process of gradual renewal and reorientation, but also to forms of more radical and controversial criticism. Conservative as well as critical tendencies can be discerned in the religious landscape on both sides of the North Sea. In spite of...