Athanasius Kircher

First published in 2004.Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) -- German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt -- almost anything incompletely understood. Kircher coined the term electromagnetism, printed Sanskrit for the first time in a Western book, and built a famous museum collection. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. They are being rediscovered in our own time. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.-

Even the man who knew everything was wrong some of the time.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 80) stand out as one of the last all-encompassing minds. For this true Renaissance man, the whole world was a glorious appearance of God waiting to be explored. Kircher was a Jesuit and an archeologist, a phenomenal linguist and an avid collector of scientific instruments. He deciphered archaic languages, experimented with alchemy and music therapy, optics and magnetism. Egyptian mystery wisdom, Greek, Cabbalistic and Christian philosophy met on common ground in his work. Kircher's sumptuous volumes were revered throughout Europe, and his gigantic oeuvre is represented here through striking engravings - most of them reprinted for the first time - together with annotations and an introduction to Kircher's life and work.

Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit in 17th-century Rome, was an extraordinary polymath. His fascinating correspondence with popes, princes and priests was a key to the mind-set of the period, and the transition from medieval to modern scientific thinking.

Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation of Kircher's hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, he shows how Kircher's study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilisations.