Arabs and Arabists contains nineteen selected articles by Alastair Hamilton on the Western acquisition of knowledge of the Arab and Ottoman world in the early modern period. The first essays are on Arabs who visited Europe and gave instruction to Western Arabists, and on Europeans who either visited the Arab (or the Ottoman) world in search of manuscripts and information or who, like Franciscus Raphelengius, Isaac Casaubon and Adriaen Reland, studied it at a distance and remained in the West. These are followed by a section on the actual study of the Arabic language in Europe, and above all the creation of the first Arabic-Latin dictionaries, and another on the European study of Islam and Western translations of the Qur’an.
The Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes (Heidelberg, 1567), written by exiled Spanish Protestants, is the first systematic denunciation of the Spanish Inquisition. Its first part is a description of the Inquisition’s methods, making use of the Inquisition’s own instruction manual, which was not publicly known. Its second section presents a gallery of individuals who suffered persecution in Seville during the anti-Protestant repression (1557-1565). The book had a great impact, being almost immediately translated into English, French, Dutch, German, and Hungarian. The portraits very soon passed into Protestant martyrologies, and the most shocking descriptions (torture, auto de fe) became ammunition for anti-Spanish literature. This critical edition presents a new text as well as, for the first time, extensive notes.
This open access book explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology. Johannes de Sacrobosco compiled his Tractatus de sphaera during the thirteenth century in the frame of his teaching activities at the then recently founded University of Paris. It soon became a mandatory text all over Europe. As a result, a tradition of commentaries to the text was soon established and flourished until the second half of the 17th century. Here, readers will find an informative overview of these commentaries complete with a rich context. The essays explore the educational and social backgrounds of the writers. They also detail how their careers developed after the publication of their commentaries, the institutions and patrons they were affiliated with, what their agenda was, and whether and how they actually accomplished it. The editor of this collection considers these scientific commentaries as genuine scientific works. The contributors investigate them here not only in reference to the work on which it comments but also, and especially, as independent scientific contributions that are socially, institutionally, and intellectually contextualized around their authors.
After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God. Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse. Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.
A study of the philosophical and theological thought of Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535). It contains new perspectives on Agrippa's place in the world of humanism and offers a new approach to the interpretation of Renaissance declamations.
Scholarship between Europe and the Levantis a collection of essays in honour of Professor Alastair Hamilton. The contributions discuss scholarly, artistic and religious encounters between Europe and the Islamic world between the sixteenth and the late nineteenth century.
Joar Haga traces the Lutheran doctrine of communicatio idiomatum, the exchange of properties between the natures of Christ, as it developed in some important controversies of the 16th and the early 17th Century. Regarding it as the nerve of his soteriology, Luther stressed the intimacy of the two natures in Christ to such a degree that it threatened to end the peaceful relationship between theology and philosophy. At the same time as the Wittenberg reformers broke with certain strains of their philosophical heritage, they would insist that the continuation of Christ's bodily presence was a reality in sacrament and nature (!), irreducible to a sign or to a memory. On the other hand, they did not want to be ignorant of the claims of reason. By rejecting the classic framework for a peaceful coexistence of philosophy and theology on the one hand, and insisting on Christ's bodily reality on the other, the quest for a new concept of how philosophy and theology related was implicitly stated.Earlier research identified two traditions of Lutheran Christology: One train of thought follows Luther in emphasising the difference between philosophy and theology. This can be seen in the Tübingen solutions where Johannes Brenz and Theodor Thumm are the most interesting thinkers. Another train of thought can be found in the conservative pupils of Melanchthon, where Martin Chemnitz and Balthasar Mentzer are the most prominent theologians. This research does not merely group the thinkers within the confines of a tradition, but underlines their individual contributions to an open-ended history.
Thinking of the text from the Dies frae (S. Matthew, XXV, 40). It is also probable that this other Saint Francis, partly out of admiration for his illustrious compatriot of Assisi and partly from a compelling urge to be superlative in all things, chose the title in opposition to the Franciscans, the Fratres Minori, l who had previously adopted this style taken from Saint Matthew, XXIII, 8. The title "Minim" was confirmed in these words" ... eosque Eremitos Ordinis Minimorum Fratrum Eremitarum F. Francesci de Paula in posterum nuncupari," taken from the Papal Bull, Meritis religiosae vitae, of 26 February, 1493. The earliest reference to the Order in France is in a fragment preserved in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal called, La regle et vie de Frere Franfois, pauvre et humble hermite de Paule, laquelle donne a tous ses 2 freres voulant entrer et vivre en son ordre. The dating of this manuscript should be accepted with considerable reserve; it bears a clearly legible "1474," although it seems most unlikely that any reference to an Order occurred before the Bull of 1493 or that any Rule appeared in French before the Founder's visit to Louis XI in 1483. 3 The fame of Francis and his reputation as a "guerisseur" had reached the French court where Louis XI was sick and dying; the King summoned him to the chateau of Le Plessis-Ies-Tours, but it required the intervention of the Pope to make the hermit undertake the journey
