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Space, Time, and Experience (1300–1800)
How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge.
With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of – at times little-known – visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now.

Contributors include: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar
Volume Editors: and
This book explores how European naturalists and artists perceived, investigated, and presented the relationship between insects and colors from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The contributors to this volume examine the creative methods and strategies that were developed to record color-related information about insects through studies on Hoefnagel’s glazed metal and hand-coloring practices; the lepidochromy technique used in paintings by Marseus van Schriek and later naturalists; the representation of sexual dimorphism of color and variable color of caterpillars in the images of Goedaert, Merian, Albin, and Rösel von Rosenhof; the painting-by-numbers technique applied to Schäffer’s bookplates on Regensburg insects; Schiffermüller’s watercolor originals of caterpillars; and finally, the color fading of exotic cabinet specimens and how this issue was tackled by Abbot and Smith. The volume is lavishly illustrated with rare and unpublished images and offers new insights into the interrelation between natural history and visual practices concerning the color of insects, with a special focus on butterflies and moths.

Contributors are Harald Bruckner, Kay Etheridge, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, Karin Leonhard, V.E. Mandrij, Kimberly Schenck, Stacey Sell, Giulia Simonini, and Friedrich Steinle.
The Foundation and Early History of Gresham College, London 1565–1710
In this erudite book, Ian Adamson provides a comprehensive history of Gresham College in the seventeenth century, particularly its contribution to the intellectual, educational, and administrative life of London and England. He analyses its relationship with the Tudor and Stuart courts, the Corporation of London, the universities, and the Royal Society, and assesses the quality and effectiveness of all the professors elected during this period. Finally, he explains the presence in the College of Ben Jonson and Sir Kenelm Digby, why it is likely that Shakespeare was often in attendance, and the enduring impact of John Ward’s collective biography of the professors.
Disciplines and New Approaches to Natural Philosophy, from John Dee to Isaac Newton
Author:
The Scientific Revolution saw the redefinition of many scholastic notions about the nature of the world and its constituent parts, from planets to particles. Wang’s book introduces a convincing and wide-ranging narrative of the changing place of ‘occult qualities’ in the context of emergent new scientific methods and early modern disciplinary realignments. Through in-depth analysis of the diverse treatments of this notion, whereby it becomes now a hollow phrase, now a touchstone for the superiority of new physics, Wang shows how the transformation of this notion is key to understanding almost every facet of the new physics of the age.
Teaching Cartesian Philosophy in the Early Modern Age
The volume offers the first large-scale study of the teaching of Descartes’s philosophy in the early modern age. Its twenty chapters explore the clash between Descartes’s “new” philosophy and the established pedagogical practices and institutional concerns, as well as the various strategies employed by Descartes’s supporters in order to communicate his ideas to their students. The volume considers a vast array of topics, sources, and institutions, across the borders of countries and confessions, both within and without the university setting (public conferences, private tutorials, distance learning by letter) and enables us thereby to reconsider from a fresh perspective the history of early modern philosophy and education.
Volume 2 of the two-volume set MITS 56: In 1508, Johannes Trithemius, the Black Abbot, dedicated his Polygraphia, a treatise on writing in ciphers, to Emperor Maximilian I, personally handing over an elaborate autograph. Unlike the editio princeps, which was to be printed a decade later, the manuscript retains the arcane and mysterious tone of the bibliophile scholar’s earlier works on the subject. This book offers the first critical edition and translation of this first version, together with an extensive commentary illuminating the numerous obscure allusions, the impressive literary knowledge of its author, and the genesis of the mechanisms discussed.
Volume 1 of the two-volume set MITS 56: In 1508, Johannes Trithemius, the Black Abbot, dedicated his Polygraphia, a treatise on writing in ciphers, to Emperor Maximilian I, personally handing over an elaborate autograph. Unlike the editio princeps, which was to be printed a decade later, the manuscript retains the arcane and mysterious tone of the bibliophile scholar’s earlier works on the subject. This book offers the first critical edition and translation of this first version, together with an extensive commentary illuminating the numerous obscure allusions, the impressive literary knowledge of its author, and the genesis of the mechanisms discussed.
Tradition, Teaching, and Trials at Leiden University, 1575-1639
Author:
How did medical students become Galenic physicians in the early modern era? Making Physicians guides the reader through the ancient sources, textbooks, lecture halls, gardens, dissecting rooms, and patient bedsides in the early decades of an important medical school. Standard pedagogy combined book learning and hands-on experience. Professors and students embraced Galen’s models for integrating reason and experience, and cultivated humanist scholarship and argumentation, which shaped their study of chymistry, medical botany, and clinical practice at patients' bedsides, in private homes and in the city hospital. Following Galen’s emphasis on finding and treating the sick parts, professors correlated symptoms and the evidence from post-mortems to produce new pathological knowledge.
Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science
Memory and Identity in the Learned World offers a detailed and varied account of community formation in the early modern world of learning and science. The book traces how collective identity, institutional memory and modes of remembrance helped to shape learned and scientific communities.

The case studies in this book analyse how learned communities and individuals presented and represented themselves, for example in letters, biographies, histories, journals, opera omnia, monuments, academic travels and memorials. By bringing together the perspectives of historians of literature, scholarship, universities, science, and art, this volume studies knowledge communities by looking at the centrality of collective identity and memory in their formations and reformations.

Contributors: Lieke van Deinsen, Karl Enenkel, Constance Hardesty, Paul Hulsenboom, Dirk van Miert, Alan Moss, Richard Kirwan, Koen Scholten, Floris Solleveld, and Esther M. Villegas de la Torre.
Forgery and Early Modern Alchemy, Medicine and Natural Philosophy
Volume Editors: and
The production of forgeries under the name of the Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493/94-1541) was an integral part of the diffusion of the Paracelsian movement in early modern Europe. Many of these texts were widely read and extremely influential. The inability of most readers of the time to distinguish the genuine from the fake amid the flood of publications contributed much to the emergence of Paracelsus’ legendary image as the patron of alchemy and occult philosophy. Innovative studies on largely overlooked aspects of Paracelsianism along with an extensive catalogue of Paracelsian forgeries make this volume an essential resource for future studies.

Contributors are Tobias Bulang, Dane T. Daniel, Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr., Hiro Hirai, Didier Kahn, Julian Paulus, Lawrence M. Principe, and Martin Žemla.

Originally published as Special Issue of the journal Early Science and Medicine, volume 24 (2019), no. 5-6 (published February 2020), with a revised Introduction and a new Appendix by Julian Paulus, entitled “A Catalogue Raisonné of Pseudo-Paracelsian Writings: Texts Attributed to Paracelsus and Paracelsian Writings of Doubtful Authenticity,” has been added.