The separation of science and religion in modern secular culture can easily obscure the fact that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe ideas about nature were intimately related to ideas about God. Readers of this book will find fresh and exciting accounts of a phenomenon common to both science and religion: deviation from orthodox belief. How is heterodoxy to be measured? How might the scientific heterodoxy of particular thinkers impinge on their religious views? Would heterodoxy in religion create a predisposition towards heterodoxy in science? Might there be a homology between heterodox views in both domains? Such major protagonists as Galileo and Newton are re-examined together with less familiar figures in order to bring out the extraordinary richness of scientific and religious thought in the pre-modern world.

The prevailing consensus among historians is that natural theology within Protestantism was born in the eighteenth century as a byproduct of the Enlightenment and had a sharply diminished if not nonexistent role within Puritanism. Based on an exhaustive study of the writings of some sixty English and American Puritans spanning from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, this book demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Puritan theologians not only embraced natural theology on a theoretical level but employed it in a surprising variety of pastoral, apologetic, and evangelical contexts, including their missionary activities to the Indians of New England. Some Puritans even asserted that people who had never heard about Christianity could be saved through the knowledge afforded them by natural theology. This conclusion reshapes our understanding of the history of apologetics and sheds fresh light on the origins of the Enlightenment itself. Puritanism and Natural Theology also examines the crises of doubt experienced by several prominent Puritan theologians, advances our understanding of the oft-debated issue of the role of reason within Puritanism, and sets the Puritans' enthusiasm for natural science within the broader context of their beliefs about natural theology.

The tremendous changes in the role and significance of religion during Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation affected all of society. Yet, there have been few attempts to view medicine and the ideas underpinning it within the context of the period and see what changes it underwent. Medicine and the Reformation charts how both popular and official religion affected orthodox medicine as well as more popular healers. Illustrating the central part played by medicine in Lutheran teachings, the Calvinistic rationalization of disease, and the Catholic responses, the contributors offer new perspectives on the relation of religion and medicine in the early modern period. It will be of interest to social historians as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

From the early Christian era and throughout the Middle Ages, theologians exerted considerable effort to achieve a synthesis bringing together Greek cosmology and the Creation story in Genesis. In the construction of the medieval Empyrean, the dwelling place of the Blessed, Aristotle’s philosophy proved of critical importance. From the Renaissance on, largely in revolt against Aristotle, humanist Bible critics, Protestant reformers and astronomers set themselves to challenge the medieval synthesis. Especially effective in the ensuing dismantlement, from the 16th to 18th centuries, was the pagan concept of an infinite universe, resuscitated from Antiquity by the Italian philosophers Bruno and Patrizi. Indirectly inspired by the latter, the doctrines of the French pre-Enlightenment thinkers Descartes and Gassendi spread throughout Latin Catholic Europe in spite of considerable resistance. By the middle of the 18th century the Roman ecclesiastical authorities were brought to acknowledge an end to the medieval cosmos, allowing Catholics to teach the theory of heliocentrism.

The author and six historical characters of his own choosing tell tales and guide you through the artistic and literary maze of Latin-occupied Greece. They show you patterns, influences, and dissimilar evolutions in what appears to be a 13th-14th century cultural conundrum.

This volume provides a much needed, historically accurate narrative of the development of theories of space up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It studies conceptions of space that were implicitly or explicitly entailed by ancient, medieval and early modern representations of the cosmos. The authors reassess Alexandre Koyré’s groundbreaking work From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) and they trace the permanence of arguments to be found throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. By adopting a long timescale, this book sheds new light on the continuity between various cosmological representations and their impact on the ontology and epistemology of space. Readers may explore the work of a variety of authors including Aristotle, Epicurus, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, John Wyclif, Peter Auriol, Nicholas Bonet, Francisco Suárez, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Libert Froidmont, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke. We see how reflections on space, imagination and the cosmos were the product of a plurality of philosophical traditions that found themselves confronted with, and enriched by, various scientific and theological challenges which induced multiple conceptual adaptations and innovations. This volume is a useful resource for historians of philosophy, those with an interest in the history of science, and particularly those seeking to understand the historical background of the philosophy of space.