Religion, Magic, and the Origins of Science in Early Modern England PDF Download
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Author: John Henry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351219286
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 554
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Book Description
In these articles John Henry argues on the one hand for the intimate relationship between religion and early modern attempts to develop new understandings of nature, and on the other hand for the role of occult concepts in early modern natural philosophy. Focussing on the scene in England, the articles provide detailed examinations of the religious motivations behind Roman Catholic efforts to develop a new mechanical philosophy, theories of the soul and immaterial spirits, and theories of active matter. There are also important studies of animism in the beginnings of experimentalism, the role of occult qualities in the mechanical philosophy, and a new account of the decline of magic. As well as general surveys, the collection includes in depth studies of William Gilbert, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry More, Francis Glisson, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton.
Author: John Henry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351219286
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 554
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Book Description
In these articles John Henry argues on the one hand for the intimate relationship between religion and early modern attempts to develop new understandings of nature, and on the other hand for the role of occult concepts in early modern natural philosophy. Focussing on the scene in England, the articles provide detailed examinations of the religious motivations behind Roman Catholic efforts to develop a new mechanical philosophy, theories of the soul and immaterial spirits, and theories of active matter. There are also important studies of animism in the beginnings of experimentalism, the role of occult qualities in the mechanical philosophy, and a new account of the decline of magic. As well as general surveys, the collection includes in depth studies of William Gilbert, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry More, Francis Glisson, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton.
Author: Mark A. Waddell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108591167
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world.
Author: Keith Thomas
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141932406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 853
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Book Description
Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.
Author: Bruce Janacek
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271078022
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their national—and in some cases royalist—loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in England’s church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake.
Author: Frank Klaassen
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271085177
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic. The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic. Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.
Author: Michael Hunter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300243588
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
A new history that overturns the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain--named a Best Book of 2020 by the Financial Times In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Credit for this great change is usually given to science - and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. But is this justified? Michael Hunter argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers. While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about. When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place.
Author: Ulrich L. Lehner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019993794X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 689
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Book Description
This text provides a comprehensive and reliable introduction to Christian theological literature originating in Western Europe from, roughly, the end of the French Wars of Religion (1598) to the Congress of Vienna (1815). Using a variety of approaches, the contributors examine theology spanning from Bossuet to Jonathan Edwards.
Author: David J. Collins, S. J.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271084391
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science. Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.
Author: Brian P. Levack
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191648833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
The essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. During these years witches were thought to be evil people who used magical power to inflict physical harm or misfortune on their neighbours. Witches were also believed to have made pacts with the devil and sometimes to have worshipped him at nocturnal assemblies known as sabbaths. These beliefs provided the basis for defining witchcraft as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and prosecuting tens of thousands of women and men for this offence. The trials resulted in as many as fifty thousand executions. These essays study the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions in the various kingdoms and territories of Europe and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. They also relate these prosecutions to the Catholic and Protestant reformations, the introduction of new forms of criminal procedure, medical and scientific thought, the process of state-building, profound social and economic change, early modern patterns of gender relations, and the wave of demonic possessions that occurred in Europe at the same time. The essays survey the current state of knowledge in the field, explore the academic controversies that have arisen regarding witch beliefs and witch trials, propose new ways of studying the subject, and identify areas for future research.
Author: Frank Klaassen
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056266
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
"Explores two principal genres of illicit learned magic in late Medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic, which could not"--Provided by publisher.
