Magic, memory and natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
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Bibliographic Information
Magic, memory and natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(Variorum collected studies series, CS973)
Ashgate Variorum, c2011
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Magic, memory and natural philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries
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Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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'.
Table of Contents
- 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.
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