Die Drei Geister Des Menschen

Investigating the meanings and uses of "spiritus" in a variety of early modern disciplines and fields - natural philosophy, theology, music, literature and the visual arts - this book revisits the ambivalent history of a central ancient concept in a period of crisis and change.

The essays in the present volume attempt to historically reconstruct the various dependencies of philosophical and scientific knowledge of the material and technical culture of the Early Modern era and to draw systematic conclusions for the writing of Early Modern history of science.

This book explores changes in emotional cultures of the early modern battlefield. Military action involves extraordinary modes of emotional experience and affective control of the soldier, and it evokes strong emotional reactions in society at large. While emotional experiences of actors and observers may differ radically, they can also be tightly connected through social interaction, cultural representations and mediatisation. The book integrates psychological, social and cultural perspectives on the battlefield, looking at emotional behaviour, expression and representation in a great variety of primary source material. In three steps it discusses the emotional practices in the army, the emotional experiences of the individual combatant and the emotions of the mediated battlefield in the visual arts.

The Hippocratic Epidemics and Galen’s Commentary on them constitute milestones in the development of clinical medicine. But they also illustrate the rich exegetical traditions that existed in the post-classical Greek world. The present volume investigates these texts from various and diverse vantage points: textual criticism; Greek philology; knowledge transfer through translations; and medical history. Especially the Syriac and Arabic traditions of the Epidemics come under scrutiny.

This volume explores the entwinement of science and philosophy in the conceptions of the Renaissance thinker Bernardino Telesio. His vistas are considered from an interdisciplinary perspective bringing together the histories of philosophy, physics, astronomy, meteorology, medicine, and psychology.

In the attempt to overcome the crisis of knowledge in wisdom thought, even the non-Essene texts from Qumran developed the wisdom notion of a pre-existent order of being and history which was to be realised in the Eschaton. This notion was taken up in non-wisdom texts and elaborated into a dualistic ordering of the world and of history, structured in epochs. In this form the notion was used by the Essene community to deal theologically with their negative experience of reality (schism, persecution by Hasmonoaeans, delay of the Eschaton). The results of this investigation are thus able to confirm critical points of the thesis of G. von Rad that apocalyptic developed out of wisdom.

Drawing on the methods of a wide range of academic disciplines, this volume shifts the focus of the history of the body, exploring the many different ways in which its physiology and its fluids were understood in pre-modern European thought.