Abstract This paper claims that one way to bridge the gap between Francis Bacon’s speculative philosophy and his natural historical and experimental investigations is by looking at his peculiar top-down strategy of measuring Nature. Key to this strategy is the construction of perceptive instruments, i.e., devices “subtle enough” to detect and map natural limits, powers and virtues. In this paper, I

Abstract While scaled thermoscopes were developed only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the medical tradition had already started to quantify some secondary qualities towards the end of sixteenth century. However, degrees of heat and cold were only meaningful in connection with Galenic-Aristotelean ontology, consisting of elements, temperaments and degrees of the four humours. The first

Abstract The aim of this paper is to show how sensory qualities were used to identify, observe, and describe plants in the sixteenth century. Mattioli’s herbal is an example of Renaissance natural history, which was based on Dioscorides’ classical text. Each step of constructing a chapter of the herbal required a different approach to sensory qualities. The identification of the plants described by

Abstract For Margaret Cavendish, every single part of matter has self-knowledge, and almost every part has perceptive knowledge. This paper asks what is at stake for Cavendish in ascribing self-knowing and perceptive properties to matter. Whereas many commentators take perception and self-knowledge to be guides to Cavendish’s epistemology, this paper takes them to be guides to her metaphysics, in that

Abstract This article discusses Hooke’s microscopy in the context of the nature of his explanations of natural phenomena. It illustrates that while Hooke’s particular conception of microscopy certainly cohered with his general framework of mechanical philosophy, he thought of his microscope as an artisanal tool that could help him examine unknown natural machinery. It seems, however, that he never

Abstract In the Olympica, the lost manuscript wherein Descartes described his famous three dreams, he wrote that on the night of Saint Martin in 1619 he felt asleep in a state of enthusiasm. He interpreted the dreams that ensued as the divine revelation of the principles of a new and admirable science. I here propose that the Olympica were a literary fiction devised by Descartes to legitimize his arrival

Abstract This contribution argues that the physiological and psychological chapters of Nemesius of Emesa’s highly influential conspectus of late-antique anthropology, De natura hominis, are not random memoranda on the human organism or disjecta membra extracted from a range of late-antique sources. On the contrary, it is claimed here that De natura hominis 6-28, in which the medical anthropology of

Abstract From around 1700 onwards, a number of sensationalist claims regarding adepts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to appear in alchemical literature. They eventually made their way into standard works of historiography and continue to be repeated as factual. Yet the source for these rumours, a poem attributed to Martinus de Delle, supposedly a chamberlain of Emperor Rudolf

Abstract This paper brings both textual and ethnographic considerations to bear on Ibn Abī Ṣādiq’s (d. 1068/470H) medico-philosophical commentary on the Hippocratic Apho­risms. He considers cases of madness and absence of pain in order to discuss the problem of ikhtilāṭ al-ʿaql (mental derangement) and its relation to the body, soul, and spirit. Focusing on ikhtilāṭ offers a space to examine an important

Abstract This paper explores how a set of observations on the weight of lead were interpreted and assessed between the 1540s and the 1630s across three different interconnecting disciplines: medicine, mineralogy and chemistry. The epistemic import of these discussions will be demonstrated by showing: 1) the changing role and articulation of experience and quantification in the investigation of metals;

Abstract This paper explores the experiments of the English mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) on specific gravity in the years 1600-1605, as recorded in a series of manuscript notes in British Library Add. MS 6788. It examines the programme of reading undertaken by Harriot before (or during) these experiments (including works by Jean Bodin, Giovanni Battista della Porta, Gerard de Malynes, Gaston

Abstract The Historia densi et rari, published posthumously in 1658, is probably Francis Bacon’s most complex natural and experimental history. It contains observations and experimental reports, quantitative estimates and tables, and theoretical and methodological considerations, in a structure which has never been fully investigated. I provide here a fresh reading of this text from the perspective

Abstract Numerous early modern experimentalists, including Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon and Thomas Harriot, viewed one seemingly humble principle – that at a given volume, different substances can be identified by their particular weight, or specific gravity – as a fundamental key to the understanding of nature in general. Johannes Kepler’s Messekunst Archimedis of 1616 contains a striking summary

The term ‘instantaneous speed’ that appears explicitly in the works of famous Oxford fourteenth-century natural philosophers, William Heytesbury and Richard Swineshead (nicknamed The Calculator), seems odd in the context of the then accepted Aristotelian worldview for at least two reasons. First, Aristotle himself stated unambiguously that no motion can occur in an instant. Second, after fourteenth-century

Abstract Hendrick Uwens (1618-1667) was a Flemish-educated Jesuit who became a missionary to the Mughal Empire. Prior to embarking on his missionary work, he taught mixed mathematics in Lisbon in the early 1640s. Both in Europe and India, Uwens often insisted on portraying himself as a mathematician. Mathematics allowed him to be amongst the first teachers of certain aspects of Galileo’s physics and

Abstract This paper offers a reconstruction of the fortuna of a Hippocratic formula that has been conspicuously misunderstood since the sixteenth century by physicians and philosophers. For several centuries, and despite the increasing care with which translators and editors have examined classical texts and their circulation, the quote in question by Hippocrates has been expounded as a sentence advocating

Abstract Wolfgang Reichart (1486-c. 1547) was a humanist and a town physician of Ulm. His work consists of a largely unpublished collection of nearly 600 texts. So far, it has been claimed that this compilation only consists of letters and poems. However, we have found a medical treatise, wherein Reichart discusses a case of impotence, its pathophysiology and therapy. One of the crucial aspects in

Lichens are understood to be symbiotic organisms consisting of mycobiont and photobiont partners. This mutual partnership results in the production of unique secondary metabolites, which are used in contemporary pharmacy and medicine. The purpose of this study is to explore the uses of lichens in a particular period of medieval pharmacology: it retraced the relevant Arabic terms for, and descriptions

This paper studies the “human circulatory statues” which Salomon Reisel designed in the 1670s in order to demonstrate the circulation of the blood and its effect on the brain. It investigates how Reisel intended this project to promote Descartes’ philosophy, and how it relates to contemporary diagrammatic schematizations of the blood circulation system. It further explores Reisel’s claims concerning

In his last major book, Siris (1744), the philosopher George Berkeley proposed tar-water as a universal medicine, suggesting that he had found a panacea. Shortly after its publication, Siris became immensely popular and tar-water spread all around Europe and even reached America. The aim of this article is to present Berkeley’s ideas about tar-water as a medicine with a particular focus on the origins

Geographic and astronomical texts from late-medieval Central Europe frequently give 16 German miles, or miliaria teutonica, as the length of a degree of terrestrial latitude. The earliest identifiable author to endorse this equivalence is the Swabian astronomer Heinrich Selder, who wrote about the length of a degree and the circumference of the Earth on several occasions during the 1360s and 1370s

This paper uses the body politic metaphor to explore the dialectic of power between different political players in communal and post-communal Lombardy. On the one hand, notions of corporeal links, drawing upon an ancient and venerable tradition, were key strands of public debate on state formation in the Late Middle Ages. On the other hand, there were distinctively communal and post-communal discourses

While scholars have widely acknowledged a reliance on medical language in the political theories of Marsilius of Padua and Niccolò Machiavelli, they have rarely investigated the epistemological status of this appropriation. Questioning Leo Strauss’ claim that Jewish-Arabic Platonic ideas on the philosopher-king could have been a possible model for Marsilius and Machiavelli, this paper aims to show

In this article, using Spinoza’s treatment of the image of the political body, I aim to show what happens to the concept of a healthy commonwealth linked to a monarchist model of political order when transformed into a new context: the emergence of a democratic political order. The traditional representation of the body politic becomes problematic when people, understood as individual natural bodies

The Astronomia Olympi novi andthe Theologia Cabalistica were published as part of the Philosophia Mystica (1618). This influential collection of Paracelsian and Weigelian texts was among the first to include a publication of the theologica of Paracelsus. Both of these short pseudo-Paracelsian works were written by Adam Haslmayr (1560-1630), the propagator of the “Theophrastia Sancta,” a philosophical

The paper is an evaluation of differing opinions regarding the authenticity of two of Paracelsus’ works, the Astronomia Magna (1537/1538) and Brief an die Wittenberger Theologen (1525). Karl Sudhoff – the exceptionally erudite and prolific Paracelsus scholar and editor – considered Paracelsus’ letter to Luther and the Wittenberg theologians to be spurious. Others have questioned the extent to which

Early modern alchemical literature is full of pseudonymous corpora. One of the most famous of these is connected with the name Basil Valentine, a supposed Benedictine monk and master of both medicinal and transmutational chymistry. Accreted over a period of nearly a century, the Valentine corpus is complex and heterogeneous. This paper endeavors to organize and recount the construction of the corpus

This article introduces the pseudo-Paracelsian treatise Aurora Philosophorum (last third of the sixteenth century) and focusses on the contexts of a specific genealogy of knowledge presented in this text. It reaches from a divine origin of human knowledge to the universities of the author’s times. Here, the transfer of science throughout history is described as a process of continuous decline. The

One of the most popular writings ascribed to Paracelsus, De natura rerum appeared in 1572. That was when the movement of forgery production reached its climax, in parallel with the multiple editions of his genuine work Archidoxis. This article aims to place the genesis of De natura rerum in the context of publication history. It will first reconstruct a “library” by surveying the works ascribed to

While De Pestilitate is generally regarded as pseudepigraphic by modern scholarship, the treatise occupied a prominent place in Johann Huser’s definitive edition of Paracelsus’ Bücher und Schrifften (1589-1591). The text offers a compelling and generally reliable guide to Paracelsian plague theory with clear resemblances to the authentic Zwey Bücher von der Pestilentz und ihren zufällen and De Peste

The pseudo-Paracelsian Philosophia ad Athenienses (1564) draws upon many of the ideas of Paracelsus but combines them with many other elements not found in the genuine works of the Swiss physician. After discussing the details of its edition, we summarize its content, then examine its possible sources, including the authentic texts of Paracelsus by which the unknown author will have taken inspiration

This paper explores the medieval debates concerning problems with the Aristotelian theory of the production and transmission of solar heat as presented in De Caelo II, 7 and Meteorologica I, 3. In these passages, Aristotle states that celestial heat is generated by the friction set up in the air by the motion of celestial bodies. This statement is difficult to reconcile with Aristotle’s cosmology,

From the time of Albertus Magnus, medieval commentators on Aristotle regularly used a passage from Meteorology 1.2 as evidence that the stars and planets influence and even govern terrestrial events. Many of these commentators integrated their readings of this work with the view that planetary conjunctions were causes of significant changes in human affairs. By the end of the sixteenth century, Italian

This article analyzes how the astronomy of Islamic societies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can be understood as cosmological. By studying the Arabic translations of the relevant Greek terms and then the definitions of the medieval Arabic dictionaries, the article finds that Arabic terms did not communicate order in the way implied by the Greek ho kósmos (ὁ κόσμος; the cosmos). Yet, astronomers

The aim of this article is to draw the attention of scholars of ancient medicine to the need to consider the works of humanists in interpreting and editing medical treatises. Because humanists, especially those who had studied medicine and botany in the Italian universities, had acquired both a theoretical knowledge of ancient writings on medicine and a practical expertise in botany that allowed them

This article argues that in the early modern period, epistemic genres were transformed to suit new purposes. Modelled on the experimental essay form used by proponents of the New Sciences, the Dutch polymath and painter Simon Eikelenberg (1663-1738) wrote down ervarenissen to document how painting materials such as varnishes were prepared. Recipes have been identified as the ubiquitous vehicles for

The Danish physician Thomas Bartholin, famous for his work as an anatomist, also nourished a career-long interest in accounts of medicine in the Bible that resulted in a series of books on the topic. His final such work, On Biblical Diseases (De morbis biblicis, 1672) attracted a wide readership and was regarded by contemporaries as a model of an early modern practice called medicina sacra, the analysis

This article argues that for Francis Bacon there is only one type of spiritual matter, which acquires different qualities and performs different functions within bodies depending on the structure it has. In order to prove this hypothesis, the paper takes as a case study the process of spontaneous generation, where there is no pre-existent spirit. as contrary to the case of the generation out of seed

This essay concerns the penetration of Cartesian ideas into medical practices and theories related to new anatomical techniques in the mid seventeenth century, and with their transfer from the Netherlands to Flanders and Germany. It begins with an overview of debates on embalmment and dissection, which were provoked by the work of the Flemish anatomical practitioner Lodewijk de Bils (1624-1671). The

In contemporary social epistemology, the claim has been made that there is a traditional “neglect of testimonial knowledge,” and that in the history of epistemology, first-hand self-knowledge was invariably prioritised over secondary knowledge. While this paper acknowledges some truth in these statements, it challenges the given explanations: the mentioned neglect of testimonial knowledge is based

What is blood? Despite William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood, many questions about blood itself remained unanswered. This article asks how and why Dutch medical men in the early eighteenth century initiated studies to understand the properties of blood. Medical professors analysed blood in chemical laboratories, as they believed that blood chemistry promoted new understandings of human

This paper explores the interconnections between the normative and the descriptive dimensions of Kant’s anthropology. It suggests that, far from being independent of each other or even excluding each other, as is often presupposed, the normative standpoint necessitates the explanatory one. To support this claim, I discuss the case of human temperaments and show in what sense a necessary component of

Sir William Petty (1623-1687), the founder of the method of “political arithmetick,” was a trained physician and anatomist. Receiving medical education both in England and on the continent, he later turned away from an academic career and a medical practice in favour of dealing with political and social matters, becoming one of the first advocates of quantifying social phenomena in order to better

In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon called for the institution of a distinct field of theoretical and practical knowledge that would deal with the tight interrelationship between the mind and the body of man, which he dubbed “the inquirie tovching hvmane natvre entyre” ( Advancement of Learning , Book II). According to Bacon, such knowledge was already in existence, but unfortunately scattered

The species of vitalism discussed here is a malleable construct, often with a poisonous reputation (but one which I want to rehabilitate), hovering in between the realms of the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and the scientific background of the Radical Enlightenment (case in point, the influence of vitalist medicine on Diderot). This is a more vital vitalism, or at least a more ‘biologistic

David Hume’s ‘science of man’ is frequently interpreted as an enterprise inspired in crucial respects by Newton’s Principia . However, a closer look at Hume’s central concepts and methodological commitment suggests that his Treatise of Human Nature is much more congruent with the research traditions that arose in the wake of Newton’s Opticks . In this paper I argue that the label Hume frequently attached

In this paper I show how what came to be known as “the double law of habit,” first formulated by Joseph Butler in a discussion of moral psychology in 1736, was taken up and developed by medical physiologists William Porterfield, Robert Whytt, and William Cullen as they disputed fundamental questions regarding the influence of the mind on the body, the possibility of unconscious mental processes, and

Prague university scholars found ten questions (six quaestiones and four probleumata) of medieval meteorology remarkable enough to include them in the agenda of annual ceremonial disputations de quolibet between 1399 and 1417. The disputations resembled rhetoric tournaments where masters of the Faculty of Arts fought with each other using their polemics about scientific and political issues of the

In the third decade of the fourteenth century, the first definitive steps were taken to replace Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion and to apply the new theory to explain finite motion in a vacuum. The main actors in this shift were the Franciscan theologians Francis of Marchia, Gerald Odonis, and Nicholas Bonet, as well as Francesc Marbres, the artist formerly known as ‘John the Canon,’ but there

This article is dedicated to the obscure Computus of Magister Cunestabulus (England, 1175), which offers a unique spotlight on the way the twelfth-century ‘Renaissance’ in mathematical astronomy impacted the Latin computistical tradition. Armed with an unusually broad array of sources newly translated from Arabic, among them Ptolemy’s Almagest, Cunestabulus applied his advanced knowledge in the service

This article analyses the role that animals play in Della Porta’s method of physiognomics. It claims that Della Porta created his own, original, method by appropriating, and yet selectively adapting Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian sources. This has not been adequately reconstructed before in previous studies on Della Porta. I trace, in two steps, the conceptual trajectory of Della Porta’s physiognomics

This paper focuses on an apparent paradox. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Jesuit professors of mathematics at the College of Santo Antao in Lisbon delivered entire courses of astrology while astrological almanacs testified to the fact that astrology had ceased to appeal to large sectors of Portuguese society. This case thus challenges the traditional perception that early modern scholars

As evidenced by student notebooks, astrology was a core component of the university curriculum in Scotland until the late seventeenth century. Edinburgh University Library catalogues document that purchases of astrology books peaked in the 1670s. By 1700, however, astrology’s place in academia had been irrevocably lost. The reasons for this abrupt elimination include changes in natural philosophy as

This article examines the specific traits of the decline of astrology in a scholarly context at the end of the seventeenth century, specifically considering the case of the University of Valencia as a robust center of astrological learning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The tradition of these university professors of astrology is compared to the attitude of the ‘novatores,’ significant

Astrology was an integral part of university teaching in the Middle Ages. The discipline of astronomia comprehended not only the calculation of planetary orbits, but also the casting of horoscopes, the calculation of houses and aspects, the character of the various planets, and the like. Although the astronomical and astrological parts were separate and had their own textbooks, both domains were taught

Jean-Baptiste Morin, arguably Europe’s most noted astrologer and anti-Copernican, was a key figure in a bitter controversy involving Pierre Gassendi, Ismael Boulliau, and a dozen other notable savants. News of the dispute captivated Learned Europe for two decades (1630-1650). It was not a backwater affair. After a humiliating quarrel on longitude, Morin expressed his anger by publicly pitting astrology

Breadfruit is best known in connection with an infamously failed project: the 1789 mutiny against the Bounty, commanded by William Bligh. However, four years later, Bligh returned to the Pacific and fulfilled his commission, delivering breadfruit and other Pacific foods to Caribbean plantations. Placing these plant transfers in the emerg- ing sciences of food and nutrition in the eighteenth century

The draining of the English Fens was one of the largest and most expensive agricultural improvement projects undertaken in early-modern England. Though the principal motivation was to make money from the improved land, many advocates of fen drainage emphasized the moral, utopian dimension of such projects, part of a much broader program for improvement and reform of all kinds to benefit the English

This introduction argues for the value of projecting as a category of analysis, while exploring the contexts for its emergence and spread as a genre of intellectual and practical activity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of the morally ambivalent figure of the “projector” in Elizabethan and Stuart England – initially in connection with confessional strife and attacks

This essay examines the relationship between monads and space in Kant's early precritical work, with special attention devoted to the question of ubeity, a Scholastic doctrine that Leibniz describes as "ways of being somewhere." By focusing attention on this concept, evidence will be put forward that supports the claim, held by various scholars, that the monad-space relationship in Kant is closer to