Oxford-Warburg Studies – serie

Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward the recognition of God as Creator and to demonstrate the compatibility of the biblical record with the new science. It was a crucial, albeit often underestimated element in the intellectual as well as socio-cultural establishment of the new science in western and central Europe beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. The importance of physico-theology in enhancing the acceptance of the new science among a broad educated public cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, this insight has not yet received much attention in the history of early modern science, chiefly because the history of physico-theology tends to highlight the activities of virtuosi rather than well-known scientists. A contribution to the history of knowledge, this is the first monograph in English on physico-theology on the European scale. It concentrates on two genres, the argument from design, and the palaeontological argument regarding the role of the Deluge in the formation of fossils. It does so without neglecting practice (correspondence and collecting). It pays considerable attention to the historical context, above all to the new image of God as a wise, benevolent, rather than unpredictable being, which provided the practitioners of physico-theology (including clergy, physicians, lawyers, and philologists) with a new and powerful argument. It draws attention to the predominantly Protestant nature of the phenomenon and looks at the longevity of the argument from design in Britain and the Netherlands, where its demise came about as late as the first half of the nineteenth century.

François Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animation explores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais' Gargantua and, mostly,in his Quart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais's 'lowly' laughter and his 'high', erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art.Bodily functions are a trademark of Rabelais's poetics. Scholarship has read them as signs of carnivalesque inversion, in line with the Bakhtinian grotesque, or of satirical degradation: in both instances, the 'lowly' is opposed to the 'high', the belly to the head. Yet for a physician like Rabelais, the 'head' or the brain as the site of cognition is not opposed to what is below it: the chest as the site of breathing, the belly and its nether regions as sites of nutrition and generation. In Renaissance medicine, these are integrated physiological systems whose products fuel each other's operations, including cognition. Read through this lens and alongside his diagnosis of the healthy or diseased culture of his time (rotting scholasticism, the humanist digestion of the classical heritage, or the schismatic convulsions shaking Christianity) Rabelais's fictions testify to his reflexive investigation into how culture results from physiological processes fuelling the inventive ability of the human animal, made manifest in pedagogical, artistic, mechanical, and spiritual 'inventions'. They display the life (rather than the truth) of culture stemming from human ingenia, that is, wits conditioned by biological natures. While these might be idiosyncratic, their animation is fuelled and shaped by the food one eats, the air one breathes, the places one inhabits, the company one keeps.In this respect Rabelaisian fiction is grotesque in a period sense. With its emphasis on hybrid forms capturing the metamorphic powers of animation, grotesque ornament reflexively commented on the embodied inventive processes underpinning Renaissance mimesis. Rabelais's fictions display a similar logic: they foreground the inventive powers of ingenious animation and articulate reflexive, often ironic alternatives to the humanist views they alter: a thoroughly embodied anthropology, a naturalist genealogy of cultural production and transmission, a phantastical account of artistic invention as uncanny liveliness.

This collection of essays treats a topic that has scarcely been approached in the literature on Hebrew and Hebraism in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Christians, especially Protestants, studied the Mishnah alongside a host of Jewish commentaries in order to reconstruct Jewish culture, history, and ritual, shedding new light on the world of the Old and New Testaments. Their work was also inextricably dependent upon the vigorous Mishnaic studies of early modern Jewish communities. Both traditions, in a sense, culminated in the monumental production in six volumes of an edition and Latin translation of the Mishnah published by Guilielmus Surenhusius in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1703. Surenhusius gathered up more than a century's worth of Mishnaic studies by scholars from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the commentaries of Maimonides and Obadiah of Bertinoro (c. 1455-c.1515), but this edition was also born out of the unique milieu of Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, a place which offered possibilities for cross-cultural interactions between Jews and Christians. With Surenhusius's great volumes as an end point, the essays presented here discuss for the first time the multiple ways in which the canonical text of Jewish law, the Mishnah (c.200 CE), was studied by a variety of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, in early modern Europe. They tell the story of how the Mishnah generated an encounter between different cultures, faiths, and confessions that would prove to be enduringly influential for centuries to come.

Constructing a Renaissance Pope: Rhetoric, Ceremony, and Authority in the Age of Leo X (1513-1521) examines the rhetoric and ceremony of the papal court during the pontificate of Pope Leo X (1513-1521). The son of Lorenzo de' Medici, Leo has been celebrated for bringing a Golden Age of cultural efflorescence to Renaissance Rome, but he has also been excoriated for the prodigality, nepotism, and corruption that provoked Martin Luther first to criticize and then to split from the church. This study does not focus on Leo as a historical individual but analyses the collaborative efforts of curial officials, humanists, and ceremonial experts to construct his image. Although personal loyalty and private self-interest motivated these bureaucrats and scholars, so too did commitment to a traditional vision of papal authority, a vision facing new challenges in an era of rapid spiritual, social, and political change. Weaving together material from the diaries and manuals of Paris de' Grassi, the papal Master of Ceremonies, and a variety of letters, orations, and other humanist texts, the book situates papal image-making techniques within the broader context of Renaissance culture. It argues that the scripted rites and Ciceronian rhetoric on which the papal court spent so much time and money served as tools of persuasion, creating a rarefied arena in which power, hierarchy, and tradition were continually negotiated. By embedding curial activities within the geopolitical and cultural landscape of early sixteenth-century Europe, the book illuminates the tension between the mystique of traditional authority and the new technologies, political norms, and religious dissent that conspired to destabilize the papal role.

This book collects eight lectures given at the Warburg Institute in 1958-59 by Scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States. They are concerned with the aftermath of the conversion of Constantine - the conflicts between pagans and Christians and their effects on the life and thought of fourth-century Rome. The topics dealt with include the changes in the structure of society and of the army, problems of philosophy and historiography, the revival of ancient cults and beliefs, and the new attitude to the barbarians. An introduction by the editor attempts to link these various aspects with more general process of the decline of the Roman Empire.

This volume is the first half of an intellectual biography of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the greatest classical scholar of his time. Anthony Grafton describes Scaliger's early work as an editor of and commentator on classical texts, setting this into the wider context of classical scholarship in the Renaissance. At the same time he interprets the major changes that Scaliger's work underwent, as responses to pressures exerted by his social situation and emotional life.

`This handsomely illustrated book is an original attempt to make clear how much the art of the orators and the painters in the Renaissance had in common ... Extremely important for the history of art.' Neo-Latin News

The Government of Florence Under the Medici 1434-1494 investigates the ways in which the Medici established and exercised their authority. Although de facto rulers of Florence, they wielded their power within the structure of the Florentine constitution and enjoyed no political rights and privileges denied to other prominent citizens. Nicolai Rubinstein examines the complex system of controls which the Medici gradually created to secure and increase their ascendancy, and throws fresh light on the personalities and groups supporting the Medici regime, as well as on the surviving republican opposition. In this second edition, Professor Rubinstein has taken account of the many important studies on fifteenth-century Florence, in particular on Lorenzo and his age, that have appeared since the publication of the first edition over thirty years ago. He has added an essay on the techniques by which a number of important administrative offices were subjected to electoral controls before and after the establishment of the Medici regime, and also added a brief account of the procedures of the council of Seventy of 1480, as well as a list of its members in 1489. The reorganization of the Archivio delle Tratte has necessitated the revision of every single reference to what is by far the largest group of sources on which this book is based. Reviews of the first edition:`The importance of the theme need not be laboured. Florence is the most interesting of all proto-democracies, the Medici among the most intriguing of all dynasties (especially before they became dynasts).' Times Literary Supplement `a fundamental contribution to Florentine history, which will be used as a source by historians for many years to come.' British Book News `an extremely important and useful book.' Philosophical Studies

Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. While its origins in France, its impact in colonial America, and its influence in England, Scotland, and Ireland have been studied in detail, its uniquely warm reception in central Europe - where the great majority of posthumous reprintings of Ramus's work appeared - has never been synoptically studied. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, therefore has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the 'new philosophy' in the mid-seventeenth century.

This is the first study of the reception of the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Professor Hamilton discusses the concepts of biblical apocrypha and canonicity in connection with the increasingly critical attitude to religious authority which developed with the humanists and intensified with the Reformation. The Book owed its initial success to Hebraists such as Pico della Mirandola and Bibliander. It was used to account for the origins of Jewish Kabbalah and to prophesy political and religious events: the fall of the Ottoman empire, or the destruction of the papacy. Anabaptists, dissident Protestants of various persuasions, Rosicrucians and Paracelsians consulted it not only as a work of prophecy but, it is argued, as an emblem of dissent, rejected by the official Churches. At the same time more sober scholars, both Protestants and Catholics, scrutinized 2 Esdras with greater objectivity, endeavouring to date it correctly and establish its authorship. This study also investigates the interaction between their views and those of the Book's enthusiastic supporters.

The period between the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment has long been regarded as the zenith of the 'republic of letters', a pan-European community of like-minded scholars and intellectuals who fostered critical approaches to the study of the Bible and other ancient texts, while renouncing the brutal religio-political disputes that were tearing their continent apart at the same time. Criticism and Confession offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive challenge to this account. Throughout this period, all forms of biblical scholarship were intended to contribute to theological debates, rather than defusing or transcending them, and meaningful collaboration between scholars of different confessions was an exception, rather than the norm. 'Neutrality' was a fiction that obscured the ways in which scholarship served the interests of ecclesiastical and political institutions. Scholarly practices varied from one confessional context to another, and the progress of 'criticism' was never straightforward.The study demonstrates this by placing scholarly works in dialogue with works of dogmatic theology, and comparing examples from multiple confessional and national contexts. It offers major revisionist treatments of canonical figures in the history of scholarship, such as Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, and Louis Cappel, based on unstudied archival as well as printed sources; and it places those figures alongside their more marginal, overlooked counterparts. It also contextualizes scholarly correspondence and other forms of intellectual exchange by considering them alongside the records of political and ecclesiastical bodies. Throughout, the study combines the methods of the history of scholarship with techniques drawn from other fields, including literary, political, and religious history. As well as presenting a new history of seventeenth-century biblical criticism, it also critiques modern scholarly assumptions about the relationships between erudition, humanistic culture, political activism, and religious identity.

This book articulates a new approach to medieval aesthetic values, emphasizing the sensory and emotional basis of all medieval arts, their love of play and fine craftsmanship, of puzzles, and of strong contrasts. Written for a general educated audience as well as students and scholars in the field, it offers an understanding of medieval literature and art that is rooted in the perceptions and feelings of ordinary life, made up of play and laughter as well as serious work. Medieval

In seventeenth-century Europe the Copts, or the Egyptian members of the Church of Alexandria, were widely believed to hold the key to an ancient wisdom and an ancient theology. Their language was thought to lead to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs and their Church to retain traces of early Christian practices as well as early Egyptian customs. Now available in paperback for the first time, this first, full-length study of the subject, discusses the attempts of Catholic missionaries to force the Church of Alexandria into union with the Church of Rome and the slow accumulation of knowledge of Coptic beliefs, undertaken by Catholics and Protestants. It ends with a survey of the study of the Coptic language in the West and of the uses to which it was put by Biblical scholars, antiquarians, theologians, and Egyptologists.

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city's significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how historical writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualising the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568), Stefan Bauer shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Crucial questions were, for example: How were the pontiffs elected? How many popes had been puppets of emperors? Could any of the past machinations, schisms, and disorder in the history of the Church be admitted to the reading public? Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of ideology and censorship placed on them. The Invention of Papal History sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.

In 1503, for the first time, a student in Paris was able to spend his entire university career studying only the printed textbooks of his teacher, thanks to the works of the humanist and university reformer Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455-1536). As printed books became central to the intellectual habits of following generations, Lefèvre turned especially to mathematics as a way to renovate the medieval university.Making Mathematical Culture argues this was a pivatol moment in the cultural history of Europe and explores how the rise of the printed book contributed to the growing profile of mathematics in the region. Using student manuscripts and annotated books, Making Mathematical Culture offers a new account of printed textbooks, as jointly made by masters and students, and how such collaborative practices informed approaches to mathematics.

During the early modern period, the emergence of what ultimately became modern science took place mainly in Latin, the international language of educated discourse of the era. Hundreds of thousands of scientific texts were published in Latin from the invention of print around 1450 to the demise of Latin as a language of science around 1850. Despite its importance, our knowledge of this literature is extremely limited. This book aims to provide an overview of this area, the first ever to be written. It does so, not from the perspective of a natural scientist or a historian of science, but of a literary scholar. Instead of the scientific content or methodology of the respective works, it focusses on the genres of scientific literature and their communicative functions. Latin Scientific Literature, 1450-1850 falls into two main parts. The first part ('Contexts') introduces four aspects of early modern intellectual culture which are crucial for an understanding of the scientific literature of the time: the development of science, the role of Latin, the concept of literature, and the rise of print. Part two ('Texts'), offers an overview of Neo-Latin scientific literature. Subsumed under five communicative functions - disclosing sources, presenting facts, arguing for certain positions, summarizing knowledge, and publicizing science - twenty pertinent genres are discussed.

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city's significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how historical writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualising the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568), Stefan Bauer shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Crucial questions were, for example: How were the pontiffs elected? How many popes had been puppets of emperors? Could any of the past machinations, schisms, and disorder in the history of the Church be admitted to the reading public? Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of ideology and censorship placed on them. The Invention of Papal History sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.

While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The humanist historiographical debate is especially significant because the notion of verisimilitude encompassed crucial elements required for the development of methods of critical assessment. By perceiving verisimilitude and factuality as irreconcilable, Quattrocento humanists reached a critical impasse—those who were interested in factual truth mostly lacked the means to ascertain it, while those that developed embryonic notions of historical criticism were not eminently concerned with the factual account of the past. This critical weakness exposed humanists to considerable risks, including that of accepting non-verisimilar historical forgeries passed off as factual. Such forgeries eventually served as a testing ground for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who sought to restore factual truth by means of critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude, thus overcoming the humanist impasse. Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy addresses Renaissance history, philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence to shed light on how humanists conceptualized truth and, more specifically, historical truth.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, theology was the most prestigious of the academic disciplines, yet its meaning and authority were increasingly unsettled. For centuries, the University of Paris had stood at the centre of theological learning in Latin Christendom, training generations of masters and defining the standards of the field. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, however, new forms of religious scholarship began to emerge beyond the university's lecture halls. Often characterised as a humanist challenge to scholastic methods, this development was in fact more far-reaching. What was at stake was not simply technique, but theology's social form: its institutional basis, communicative reach, and how expertise was claimed.This book traces this reconfiguration in Paris from the 1490s to the eve of the Council of Trent. In the city's printing houses, scholars and editors experimented with new ways of editing Scripture and the Church Fathers and reimagined how theological knowledge might circulate in print. By expanding the audiences and ambitions of religious scholarship, this editorial culture challenged the Faculty of Theology's claim to define who could speak as a theologian and under what conditions. These tensions intensified with the upheavals of the Lutheran Reformation, as Parisian theologians confronted the possibility that emerging scholarly practices had eroded their jurisdiction. They responded with censorship and polemic, but suppression did not settle the question. In 1536 the Faculty's own curriculum was reformed to include an expanded programme of advanced biblical lectures that permanently altered theological education in France.Drawing together book history and university history, the book investigates printed works alongside the University of Paris's archival records to reconstruct a shared intellectual environment in which scholarship, teaching, institutional power, and the book trade were deeply intertwined. By analysing theology as socially embedded knowledge shaped by its modes of communication, Lundberg demonstrates how, in an age of reform, theology itself became a site of contestation and renewal.

The Elect Nation is the first comprehensive study of the religious, political and cultural movement inspired by Savonarola. Based on a thorough examination of archival material and manuscript sources, the book argues that the followers of Savonarola exercised a profound influence on every facet of Florentine life during the important period of the city's transition from republic to principate. It is the author's contention that their ideology and activities provide the key to understanding not only the policital developments of the last years of the Florentine Republic, but also the nature of contemporary political debate and the characteristics of the merging Medicean Principate.A major preoccupation of the book is to show how the Savonarolans as a group managed to survive the execution of their leaders and to regain their strength and influence. The author traces their networks of support and analyses the way in which they infiltrated and restructured existing Florentine institutions to their advantage. He also reveals how they exploited spiritual counselling and lay and religious partronage to expand their influence, and, in particular, how they ensured the survival of their movement by forming an anti-Medicean alliance of republican forces in Florence.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries technical chronology, the study of calendars and of dates in ancient and medieval history, was both a fashionable and a controversial discipline. Theologians debated the dates of the Creation, the Flood, and the Crucifixion. Astronomers and historians argued about the identity of the eclipses that could supply absolute dates for events long past. Classical scholars reconstructed the religious beliefs and political practices that had governed the Greek and Roman calendars. Clerics and consultant experts, finally, debated what was to be done to mend the obviously faulty calendar of the western Church. Poliziano and Pico, Luther and Melanchthon, Copernicus and Kepler all studied and wrote about chronology.Late in the 1570s Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) turned his attention to this field. He had already established himself as an innovative and ingenious editor of Latin texts, as the first volume of this study showed. But he now became one of the most celebrated scholars in Europe. He synthesized the work of dozens of other scholars, many of them now forgotten. He started or took part in many technical debates. And on such central problems as the date and nature of the Last Supper, the reliability of the various Old Testament texts, and the worth of the fragmentary historians of the ancient Near East, he showed remarkable erudition and insight.This book tells the stories of chronology and of Scaliger himself. It describes the scholarly circles in which he moved - above all the University of Leiden, the most innovative in Europe, where he spent the last decade and a half of his life. And it reconstructs his relations with contemporary scholars and scientists - notably Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler - and his remarkable, if wholly unofficial, career as a teacher. It is a sequel to volume I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis, published in 1983.

Sydney Anglo discusses every English royal entry, festival, disguising, masque, and tournament from the accession of Henry VII to the coronation celebrations of Elizabeth I. Based principally on primary sources, his study is analytical rather than descriptive. In 1969, when this book first appeared, the serious study of Renaissance court festivals and civic pageantry was in its infancy and - although the subject has since burgeoned - the volume of publications relevant to the early Tudors was modest and largely confined to matters of detail. In this new edition Professor Anglo discusses material published since 1969 in a preface where, as far as possible, the material is arranged according to the chronological and thematic order of the book. The original pagination and notes which have regularly been cited by scholars has thereby been retained. A bibliography of works cited in the text has been added to facilitate the work of a new generation of students.

Lorenzo Polizzotto examines the educational, religious, political, and philanthropic practices of the Florentine youth confraternity of the Purification. Founded in 1427 at a time of unbounded optimism in Florence's future, the Purification was entrusted with the socialization of the youths. With the right education and training, these youths were expected eventually to lead Florence to its manifest destiny.The Purification's educational practices were solidly grounded in religious and humanist principles. In concert with the other youth confraternities, the Purification pioneered an educational programme which influenced pedagogical practices throughout Europe until the middle of the twentieth century. Its success made it an attractive prize for the contending political forces in Florence, becoming first an instrument of Medici ambitions and then of Savonarolan radical millenarism. Once Florence fell under the permanent rule of the Medici, the Purification sought to serve the city by turning to philanthropy, which it dispensed as a moral and educational duty.

Between 1513 and 1525 Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a series of works dealing with political, military, and historical matters. One of these (the 'Arte della guerra') was published in 1521, but the rest of his major writings were not published until 1531-2, nearly five years after his death. They continued to be reissued regularly, well into the early seventeenth century. The popularity of Machiavelli's books, the variety of his themes, the different contexts within which he was studied, the range of readers' interests, and the fact that his name entered the vocabulary of every European language - all make his early reception a fruitful field of enquiry. Historians of ideas have tended to tidy up the past in order to make it comprehensible but Sydney Anglo is concerned with heterogeneity, and with the often irrational and emotional aspects of sixteenth-century thought. Basing his research entirely upon primary sources he quotes extensively in the conviction that, in a battle of words, the words themselves and their tone convey more than summaries of intellectual abstractions. Authors - hostile, enthusiastic, and indifferent - are closely examined; and many different contexts, political and intellectual, are considered. Sometimes Machiavelli was influential, sometimes not, but in this history of his reception, silences often prove significant. Written in a lively and trenchant style, this new interpretation of the impact of Machievalli is an original contribution of high quality by a leading expert in the field of Renaissance studies.

The history of scholarship has undergone a complete renewal in recent years, and is now a major branch of research with vast territories to explore; a substantial introduction to History of Scholarship surveys the past vicissitudes of the history of scholarship and its current expansion.The authors, all specialists of international standing, come from a variety of backgrounds: classical studies, history of religions, philosophy, early modern intellectual and religious history. Their papers illustrate a variety of themes and approaches, including Renaissance antiquarianism and philology; the rise of the notion of criticism; Biblical and patristic scholarship, and its implications for both confessional orthodoxy and eighteeenth-century free thought; the history of philosophy; and German historiographical thought in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This challenging volume constitutes a collection of remarkable quality, helping to establish the history of scholarship as a more broadly acknowledged, worthwhile field of study in its own right.

In seventeenth-century Europe the Copts, or the Egyptian members of the Church of Alexandria, were widely believed to hold the key to an ancient wisdom and an ancient theology. Their language was thought to lead to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs and their Church to retain traces of early Christian practices as well as early Egyptian customs. This book, the first full-length study of the subject, discusses the attempts of Catholic missionaries to force the Church of Alexandria into union with the Church of Rome and the slow accumulation of knowledge of Coptic beliefs, undertaken by Catholics and Protestants. It ends with a survey of the study of the Coptic language in the West and of the uses to which it was put by Biblical scholars, antiquarians, theologians and Egyptologists.

The period between the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries saw a great many changes and innovations in scientific thinking. These were communicated to various publics in diverse ways; not only through discursive prose and formal notations, but also in the form of instruments and images accompanying texts. The collected essays of this volume examine the modes of transmission of this knowledge in a variety of contexts. The schematic representation of instruments is examined in the case of the 'navicula' (a versatile version of a sundial) and the 'squadro' (a surveying instrument); the new forms of illustration of plants and the human body are investigated through the work of Fuchs and Vesalius; theories of optics and of matter are discussed in relation to the illustrations which accompany the texts of Ausonio and Descartes. The different diagrammatic strategies adopted to explain the complex medical theory of the latitude of health are charted through the work of medieval and sixteenth-century physicians; Kepler's use of illustration in his handbook of cosmology is placed in the context of book production and Copernican propaganda. The conception of astronomical instruments as either calculating devices or as cosmological models is examined in the case of Tycho Brahe and others. A study is devoted to the multiple functions of frontispieces and to the various readerships for which they were conceived. The papers in the volume are all based on new research, and they constitute together a coherent and convergent set of case studies which demonstrate the vitality and inventiveness of early modern natural philosophers, and their awareness of the media available to them for transmitting knowledge.