Jean Fernel S On The Hidden Causes Of Things

An annotated translation of Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things (1542). A major innovatory work in Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine, and a crucially important source for understanding the notion of occult qualities, with a scholarly introduction.

An annotated translation of Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things (1542). A major innovatory work in Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine, and a crucially important source for understanding the notion of occult qualities, with a scholarly introduction.

Jean Fernel (1497-1558) was one of the foremost medical writers of his day, ranked by his contemporaries alongside Andreas Vesalius, reformer of anatomical studies, and Paracelsus, radical reformer of theories of disease and treatment. He is arguably the leading expositor of the Galenic system of medicine. He exemplifies in his Physiologia the method and approach of a typical Aristotelian philosopher in the period immediately before the downfall of Renaissance Scholasticism. John Forrester offers the Physiologia here in its entirety and provides, for the first time, a complete English translation of the work.

Exploring Renaissance humanists’ debates on matter, life and the soul, this volume addresses the contribution of humanist culture to the evolution of early modern natural philosophy so as to shed light on the medical context of the Scientific Revolution.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Lost Knowledge: The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories investigates early texts that speak of sophisticated technologies millennia ago that became obscured over time or were destroyed with the civilizations that had created them.

This book addresses early modern concepts of the body and the self – focussing on three self-narratives authored by the nobleman Osvaldo Ercole Trapp (1634–1710), a body description from head to foot, autobiographical writings, and a brief chronicle of the House of Trapp-Caldonazzo. Approaching the complex theme of the question of the early modern self and the historical body, this book intertwines consistent contextualisation and historicisation of self-interpretation and biography. This is done in three steps: first, the content and function of these self-narratives are analysed with reference to current research on early modern self-narratives. In a second step, the life and family history of Osvaldo Ercole Trapp are examined from a microhistorical perspective and placed within the context of the early modern history of Tyrol’s nobility. A third step then goes into detail on individual contexts and discourses that refine one’s comprehension of these self-narratives: noble masculinity; family, house and line; theories of procreation and education; body experience and body images. It combines textual analysis, historical anthropology with a strong gender-historical perspective, microhistory and the history of the body as a history of experience and discourse. With this approach, the study makes an innovative contribution to early modern studies on self-narratives, social history of early modern nobility and the history of the body as the history of experience and discourse. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars alike interested in intellectual, social and cultural history.