scholarly journals ‘Magic coins’ and ‘magic squares’: the discovery of astrological sigils in the Oldenburg Letters

2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Magic Squares ◽  
Early Modern Medicine

Enclosed in a 1673 letter to Henry Oldenburg were two drawings of a series of astrological sigils, coins and amulets from the collection of Strasbourg mathematician Julius Reichelt (1637–1719). As portrayals of particular medieval and early modern sigils are relatively rare, this paper will analyse the role of these medals in medieval and early modern medicine, the logic behind their perceived efficacy, and their significance in early modern astrological and cabalistic practice. I shall also demonstrate their change in status in the late seventeenth century from potent magical healing amulets tied to the mysteries of the heavens to objects kept in a cabinet for curiosos. The evolving perception of the purpose of sigils mirrored changing early modern beliefs in the occult influences of the heavens upon the body and the natural world, as well as the growing interests among virtuosi in collecting, numismatics and antiquities.

scholarly journals Michael Alberti and the Medical Therapy of the Internal Senses

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-266
Author(s):  
Andreas Rydberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
The Right ◽  
Therapeutic Perspective ◽  
German Physician

Abstract In the first half of the eighteenth century, the German physician Michael Alberti was responsible for hundreds of dissertations and other works in medicine. While the bulk of the production reflected the dominating medical topics of his time, he also developed an original focus on the internal senses and their effects on bodily health and disease. Depending on whether internal senses, such as imagination and memory, were cultivated in the right way or not, they could work as powerful remedies or as equally powerful triggers of disease and even death. This article explores this little known strand of early modern medicine in three steps. First, it shows that Alberti’s medicine took form in intimate connection to the Stahlian brand of Pietist medicine. As such, it further elaborated an existing strand of medicine that was intimately connected to German Pietism. Second, it analyses in some detail the role of the internal senses from a pathological and therapeutic perspective as well as examining what kind of persona the physician ought to embody. Lastly, it raises larger questions regarding how to understand this strand of early modern medicine. Rather than approaching it from the perspective of disciplinary history, the article seeks to reconstruct it as a part of what has sometimes been referred to as the early modern cultura animi tradition.

Emotions and the Body in Early Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Stolberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Lay Experience

Drawing on Latin treatises, letters, and autobiographical writings, this article outlines the changes in the—thoroughly somatic—learned medical understanding of the emotions (or “affectus/passiones animi”) between 1500 and 1800 and their impact on lay experience. The mixture of the four natural humors explained individuals’ different propensity to certain emotions. The emotions as such, however, were described primarily as movements of the spirits and the blood towards or away from external objects. The term “e(s)motion” emerged. The final part highlights the 18th-century shift from spirits and blood to the nerves as the principal site of the emotions. Physicians and laypersons alike now associated the emotions closely with the peculiar nervous sensibility and irritability of individuals and groups.

Fashion or Function? The Use of Silver in Seventeenth-Century Irish Society

2020 ◽  
pp. 033248932095661
Author(s):  
Jessica Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Large Array ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Documentary Sources

What was more important to consumers in seventeenth-century Ireland: the fashion or the function of their silver? This article disentangles the multiple and complex motivations informing the robust acquisition and consumption by individuals and institutions of a wide-ranging assortment of silverwares. Using the body of extant plate and a large array of documentary sources, this article poses and addresses several questions that have hitherto received little or no attention in the literature: How was silver used in seventeenth-century Ireland? Can we dismiss or prioritise the use value of items ostensibly acquired for symbolic, ceremonial or commemorative purposes? Did design and decoration matter? And, if so, how did this impact on value and utility? By answering these questions, this article evaluates plate as a material simultaneously facilitating functional purposes and expressing taste. This article uses these conclusions to generate a greater understanding of early modern Irish consumer society and the role of silver within this society.

scholarly journals Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-52
Author(s):  
Diederik F Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Precocious Puberty ◽  
Pubertal Timing ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Social Stressors ◽  
Marriage Age ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Novel Reading

Abstract During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “monstrously” early menarche and “prodigious” male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller’s heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger’s heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung).

Experiential Caribbean

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This book examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative knowledge about the natural world, and particularly the body, during the long seventeenth century. It reveals a hitherto untold history about the transformation of early modern natural and human landscapes, one that unfolds outside existent analytical frameworks for the study of the Atlantic world. The book introduces some of the earliest and richest known records carrying the voices of people of African descent, including African themselves, to change our understanding of the dynamics and intellectual spaces in which early modern people produced transformative ideas about the natural world. Caribbean cultures of bodies and healing appeared through a localized epistemological upheaval based on the experiential and articulated by ritual specialists of African origin. These changes resulted from multiple encounters between actors coming from all over the globe that occurred in a social, spiritual, and intellectual realm that, even though ubiquitous, does not appear in existent histories of science, medicine, and the African diaspora. The intellectual leaders of the mostly black and free communities of the seventeenth century Caribbean defined not only how to interpret nature, but also the very sensorial landscapes on which reality could be experienced. They invented a powerful and lasting way of imagining, defining and dealing with the world.

Jeu de la paume: Health of the Body and the Mind in Early Modern Medicine

Nuncius ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Concetta Pennuto
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Physical Exercise ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Dual Status ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Impact

This article deals with the role that gymnastics and particularly the game of handball (pila palmaria) played in early modern medicine. The game was seen as useful in order to foster good health, both of the body and the mind. Following the tradition of ancient medical sources, early modern philosophers, physicians, ball players and authors – such as Erasmus, Mercuriale, Scaino, Valleriola, Forbet and Hulpeau – elaborated a rich repertory of ideas demonstrating the impact of ball games on the education of young people, on the therapy for various diseases, and on the prevention of illness. Pila palmaria thus enjoyed a dual status, since it could act on the body through physical exercise and on the mind thanks to the pleasure produced in the player’s spirit.

Air, Wind, Sun, Spirit

Nuncius ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 658-682
Author(s):  
Frances Gage
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Early Modern Medicine

Guido Reni’s early critics described him as a painter of “celestial ideas,” and his artistic process has been characterized as one rooted in the fantasia and the Idea. From the seventeenth-century on, Reni’s figures were praised for the “airs of the heads,” a notion with astrological and medical connotations, while the papal physician and art critic Giulio Mancini described Reni’s manner as “spirited,” a term suggestive of the airy movement Reni so powerfully represented in his Aurora. The concept of “spirit” or “spirits” also retained important connotations in early modern medicine and natural philosophy. A reconsideration of Reni’s Aurora in the context of medical and natural philosophical investigations of generation, artistic creation and the nature of and relationship between celestial and terrestrial regions demonstrates the connections between early modern artistic reception, medicine and natural philosophy.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Empirical Stance

The purpose of this book is to present the philosophical thought of John Locke as the work of a Christian virtuoso. In his role as ‘virtuoso’, an experimental natural philosopher of the sort that flourished in England during the seventeenth century, Locke was a proponent of the so-called ‘new philosophy’, a variety of atomism that emerged in early modern Europe. But he was also a practicing Christian, and he professed confidence that the two vocations were not only compatible but mutually sustaining. Locke aspired, without compromising his empirical stance, to unite the two vocations in a single philosophical endeavor with the aim of producing a system of Christian philosophy. Although the birth of the modern secular outlook did not happen smoothly or without many conflicts of belief, Locke, in his role of Christian virtuoso, endeavored to resolve apparent contradictions. Nuovo draws attention to the often-overlooked complexities and diversity of Locke’s thought, and argues that Locke must now be counted among the creators of early modern systems of philosophy.

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