DE TRIBUS PRINCIPIIS, oder Beschreibung der Drey Principien Göttliches Wesens
DE TRIBUS PRINCIPIIS, oder Beschreibung der Drey Principien Göttliches Wesens

Author: Andrew Weeks

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-03-25

Total Pages: 875

ISBN-13: 900439527X

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Jacob Boehme’s Of the Three Principles of Divine Being, 1619, is vital for understanding his work as a whole, its relationship to its epoch, and its role in intellectual history. Reproduced here using the methods of critical edition, the original of the work and its adjacent translation, together with an extensive introduction and commentary, provide unprecedented access to this essential work of early modern thought and cast a fresh light on the revolutionary theological, philosophical, and scientific developments coinciding with the start of the Thirty Years’ War. The 1730 edition is annotated with reference to the manuscript sources to clarify ambiguities so that the translation can interpret the text without refracting its meaning. This makes it possible to interpret Boehme’s complex theories of the origin of the divine being and of nature, the human creature, and the female aspect of divinity.

Spiritual Alchemy
Spiritual Alchemy

Author: Mike A. Zuber

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-10-06

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0190073063

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Most professional historians see the relationship between pre-modern and modern alchemy as one of discontinuity and contrast. Mike A. Zuber challenges this dominant understanding and explores aspects of alchemy that have been neglected by recent work in the history of science. The predominant focus on the scientific aspect of alchemy, such as laboratory experiment, practical techniques, and material ingredients, argues Zuber, marginalizes the things that render alchemy so fascinating: its rich and vivid imagery, reliance on the medium of manuscript, and complicated relationship with religion. Spiritual Alchemy traces the early-modern antecedents of modern alchemy through generations of followers of Jacob Boehme, the cobbler and theosopher of Görlitz. As Boehme's disciples down the generations -- including the Silesian nobleman Abraham von Franckenberg and the London-based German immigrant Dionysius Andreas Freher, among others -- studied his writings, they drew on his spiritual alchemy, adapted it, and communicated it to their contemporaries. Spiritual alchemy combines traditional elements of alchemical literature with Christian mysticism. Defying the boundaries between science and religion, this combination was transmitted from Görlitz ultimately to England. In 1850, it inspired a young woman, later known as Mary Anne Atwood, to write her Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, usually seen as the first modern interpretation of alchemy. Drawing extensively on manuscript or otherwise obscure sources, Zuber documents continuity between pre-modern and modern forms of alchemy while exploring this hybrid phenomenon.

Aurora (Morgen Röte im auffgang, 1612) and Fundamental Report (Gründlicher Bericht, Mysterium Pansophicum, 1620)
Aurora (Morgen Röte im auffgang, 1612) and Fundamental Report (Gründlicher Bericht, Mysterium Pansophicum, 1620)

Author: Andrew Weeks

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-11-29

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 9004225684

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Jacob Boehme’s Aurora (Morgen Röte im auffgang, 1612) exercised a vast open or underground influence on popular and mystical religion, poetry, and philosophy from Germany to England to Russia. This beautiful and highly original work containing elements of alchemical, esoteric, and anticlerical thought is a portal to the cultural, scientific, and theological currents on the eve of the Thirty Years' War. Its author heralded the new heliocentrism, opposed intolerance and religious conflict, and entertained an ecstatic vision of order reconciled with freedom. This first modern English translation places the translated text opposite an edition of the German manuscript from the author’s own hand. Also included is the brief, influential Fundamental Report (Gründlicher Bericht, 1620) in a critical edition and translation. An extensive commentary that cites documents of the time offers access to the sources of Boehme’s themes and concepts.

Gnostic Apocalypse
Gnostic Apocalypse

Author: Cyril O'Regan

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0791489507

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Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century German speculative mystic, influenced the philosophers Hegel and Schelling and both English and German Romantics alike with his visionary thought. Gnostic Apocalypse focuses on the way Boehme's thought repeats and surpasses post-reformation Lutheran thinking, deploys and subverts the commitments of medieval mysticism, realizes the speculative thrust of Renaissance alchemy, is open to esoteric discourses such as the Kabbalah, and articulates a dynamic metaphysics. This book critically assesses the striking claim made in the nineteenth century that Boehme's visionary discourse represents within the confines of specifically Protestant thought nothing less than the return of ancient Gnosis. Although the grounds adduced on behalf of the "Gnostic return" claim in the nineteenth century are dismissed as questionable, O'Regan shows that the fundamental intuition is correct. Boehme's visionary discourse does represent a return of Gnosticism in the modern period, and in this lies its fundamental claim to our contemporary philosophical, theological, and literary attention.

Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture
Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture

Author: Gabriele Duerbeck

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-10-16

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1498514936

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The volume offers a survey of the contribution of German literature and culture to the evolution of ecological thought. As the field of ecocritical theory and practice is rapidly expanding towards transnational and global dimensions, it seems nevertheless necessary to consider the distinct manifestations of ecological thought in various cultures. In this sense, the volume demonstrates in twenty-six essays from different disciplines how German literature, philosophy, art, and science have contributed in unique ways to the emergence of ecological thought on national and transnational scale. The volume maps the most important and characteristic of these developments both on a theoretical and on a textual-analytical level. It is structured in five parts ranging from proto-ecological thought since early modern times (part I) to major theoretical approaches (part II), environmental history (part III), and ecocritical case studies (part IV), to ecological visions in different media and art forms (part V). The four editors have widely published and are actively involved in ecocritical literary and cultural studies. The group of editors consists of two scholars of German literature and cultural studies, Gabriele Duerbeck and Urte Stobbe (both University of Vechta), a scholar in German and comparative literature, Evi Zemanek (University of Freiburg), as well as a scholar of Anglo-American ecoliterature and ecocriticism, Hubert Zapf. All of them are involved in various projects and research networks on ecology and literature. The contributors of the individual chapters likewise are all experts in their respective fields, ranging from German literature, history, environmental studies, art history, music and art. The book is a unique and readily accessible collection of essays that is of relevance not only for a German and continental European but for a worldwide audience.

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe
Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

Author: David Beck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1317317386

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Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with ‘knowledge’ being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge.

Prophecies of Language
Prophecies of Language

Author: Kristina Mendicino

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0823274039

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The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book begins by retracing the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to Romantic writing, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophetic speech, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, as language takes place unpredictably in more than one voice and more than one tongue at once. Mendicino argues that the relation between translation and prophecy drawn by German Romantic writers fundamentally changes the way we must approach this so-called “Age of Translation.” Whereas major studies of the period have taken as their point of departure the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, Mendicino suggests that Romantic writing provokes the questions: how could one read a language that is not one? And what would such a polyvocal, polyglot language, have to say about philology—both for the Romantics, whose translation projects are most intimately related to their philological preoccupations, and for us? In Prophecies of Language, these questions are pursued through readings of major texts by G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin. These readings show how, when one questions the presupposition of works composed by individual authors in one tongue, these texts disclose more than a monoglot reading yields, namely the “plus” of their linguistic plurality. From such a surplus, each chapter goes on to advocate for a philology that, in and through an inclination toward language, takes neither its unity nor its structure for granted but allows itself to be most profoundly affected, addressed—and afflicted—by it.

Jacob Böhme in Three Worlds
Jacob Böhme in Three Worlds

Author: Lucinda Martin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 861

ISBN-13: 3110720612

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Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) has been recognized as one of the internationally most influential German authors of the Early Modern period. Even today, his writings continue to impact fields as diverse as literature, philosophy, religion and art. Yet Böhme and his reception remain understudied. As a lay author, his works were often suppressed and circulated underground. Borrowing Böhme’s idea of “three worlds” or planes of existence, this volume traces the transmission of his thought through three stations: from his first underground readers in Central and Eastern Europe, to the Netherlands, where most of his writings were first published, to Britain, where early translations made him a popular author for generations to come. Drawing on the work of both established and younger researchers from around the world, this volume charts new territory. It fills many lacunae and reveals a number of exciting discoveries, especially regarding the production and diffusion of manuscripts and previously overlooked sites of engagement. This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars interested in the development of philosophical, religious, literary and artistic thought from the 17th century to the present day.

Visualizing the Past
Visualizing the Past

Author: Kathrin Maurer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-03-22

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 3110282933

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Visual media had a decisive impact on how the past was perceived in historicist culture in nineteenth-century Germany. The panorama, photography, and book illustrations can portray the past under the auspices of spatiality. Research on historicist culture often neglects this dimension of space and concentrates on traditional historicist paradigms, such as temporality, narrative, and teleology. By investigating the visual vocabulary of different historicist genres (academic historiography, illustrated history books, historical maps), this volume expands an understanding of German historicist culture as a multi-medial phenomenon, and shows that past is conveyed in spatial forms, such as travel locations, national and colonial spaces, as well as geographical areas. Tracing these concepts of historical space, this volume demonstrates that the image works as a powerful tool to propagate the ideology of German imperialism in the nineteenth-century, but also can critically reflect the political agendas of national historicism.