Tells the compelling story of Irish healer Valentine Greatrakes and outlines his place in the history of seventeenth-century Britain. Reveals a fascinating account of his engagement with important events of the period, including the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the English civil wars, the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland, and the Restoration of 1660.

A biography of Henry Stubbe, 1632-76, classicist, polemicist, physician and philosopher.

The sense of touch had a deeply uncertain status in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It had long been seen as the most certain and reliable of the senses, and also as biologically necessary: each of the other senses could be relinquished, but to lose touch was to lose life itself. Alternatively, touch was seen as dangerously bodily, and too fully involved in sensual and sexual pleasures, to be of true worth. Feeling Pleasures argues that this tension came to the fore during the English Renaissance, and allowed some of the central debates of this period—surrounding the nature of human experience, of the material world, and of the relationship between the human and the divine—to proceed through discussions of touch. It also argues that the unstable status of touch was of particular import to the poetry of this period. By bringing touch to the fore in a period usually associated with the dominance of vision and optics, Joe Moshenska offers reconsiderations of major English poets, especially Edmund Spenser and John Milton, while exploring a range of spheres in which touch assumed new significance. These include theological debates surrounding relics and the Eucharist in the work of Erasmus, Thomas Cranmer and Lancelot Andrewes; the philosophical history of tickling; the touching of paintings and sculptures in a European context; faith healing and experimental science; and the early reception of Chinese medicine in England.

The Enlightenment, considered an age of rationalism, is not normally associated with miracles. In this intriguing book, however, Jane Shaw presents accounts of inscrutable miracles that occurred to ordinary worshippers in early modern England. She considers the reactions of intellectuals, scientists, and physicians to these miraculous events and through them explores the relations between popular and elite culture of the time. Miraculous events in England between the 1650s and the 1750s were experienced mainly not by Catholics, but by Protestants. The book looks at the political and social context of these events as well as interpretations and explanations of them by scientists, the Court, and the Church, as well as by preachers, pamphleteers, friends, and neighbors. Shaw links the lived religion of the time to intellectual history and amends the hitherto received view. The religious practice of ordinary people was as crucial to the development of Enlightenment thought as the philosophical and theological writings of the elite.

The early German Enlightenment is seen as a reform movement that broke free from traditional ties without falling into anti-Christian and extremist positions, on the basis of secular natural law, an anti-metaphysical epistemology, and new social ethics. But how did the works which were radical and critical of religion during this period come about? And how do they relate to the dominant 'moderate' Enlightenment? Martin Mulsow offers fresh and surprising answers to these questions by reconstructing the emergence and dissemination of some of the radical writings created between 1680 and 1720. The Hidden Origins of the German Enlightenment explores the little-known freethinkers, persecuted authors, and secretly circulating manuscripts of the era, applying an interdisciplinary perspective to the German Enlightenment. By engaging with these cross-regional, clandestine texts, a dense and highly original picture emerges of the German early Enlightenment, with its strong links with the experience of the rest of Europe.

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was one of the most influential scientific and theological thinkers of his time. This is the first edition of his correspondence, transcribed from the original manuscripts. It is fully annotated, with an introduction and general index. The four volumes cover the time periods of Volume 1: 1936-91, Volume 2: 1662-5, Volume 3: 1666-7 and finally Volume 4 1668 to 77.

Challenging the common assumption that religious heterodoxy was a prelude to the secularisation of thought, this volume explores the variety of relations between heterodox theology, political thought, moral and natural philosophy and historical writing in both Protestant and Catholic Europe from 1600 to the Enlightenment.