Magic, Memory and Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4094-1975-4
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 332 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 224 mm, Gewicht: 722 g

Reihe: Variorum Collected Studies

This collection of Stephen Clucas's articles addresses the complex interactions between religion, natural philosophy and magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The essays on the Elizabethan mathematician and magus John Dee show that the angelic conversations of John Dee owed a significant debt to medieval magical traditions and how Dee's attempts to communicate with spirits were used to serve specific religious agendas in the mid-seventeenth century. The essays devoted to Giordano Bruno offer a reappraisal of the magical orientation of the Italian philosopher's mnemotechnical and Lullist writings of the 1580s and 90s and show his influence on early seventeenth-century English understandings of memory and intellection. Next come three studies on the atomistic or corpuscularian natural philosophy of the Northumberland and Cavendish circles, arguing that there was a distinct English corpuscularian tradition prior to the Gassendian influence in the 1640s and 50s. Finally, two essays on the seventeenth-century Intelligencer Samuel Hartlib and his correspondents shows how religion alchemy and natural philosophy interacted during the 'Puritan Revolution'.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clucas, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents: Preface; John Dee's Angelic Conversations and the ars notoria: Renaissance magic and mediaeval theurgy; Enthusiasm and "damnable curiosity": Meric Casaubon and John Dee; Non est legendum sed inspicendum solum: inspectival knowledge and the visual logic of John Dee's Liber Mysteriorum; In Campo Fantastico: Alexander Dicson, Walter Warner and Brunian mnemonics; Giordano Bruno's De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione: art, magic and mnemotechnics; Amorem, artem, magiam, mathesim: Brunian images and the domestication of the soul; Galileo, Bruno and the rhetoric of dialogue in 17th-century natural philosophy; Corpuscular matter theory in the Northumberland circle; The atomism of the Cavendish circle: a reappraisal; "The infinite variety of formes and magnitudes": 16th- and 17th-century English corpuscular philosophy and Aristotelian theories of matter and form; In search of 'The True Logick': methodological eclecticism among the 'Baconian reformers'; The correspondence of a 17th-century "chymicall gentleman": Sir Cheney Culpeper and the chemical interests of the Hartlib circle; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Stephen Clucas is Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History at Birkbeck, University of London, U.K., and is co-Editor of the journal Intellectual History Review.