Prophecy Alchemy And The End Of Time

Author : Leah DeVun
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2013-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231145398

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Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time by Leah DeVun Pdf

In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar John of Rupescissa sent a dramatic warning to his followers: the end times were coming; the apocalypse was near. Rupescissa's teachings were unique in his era. He claimed that knowledge of the natural world, and alchemy in particular, could act as a defense against the calamity of the last days. He treated alchemy as medicine (his work was the conceptual forerunner of pharmacology), and reflected emerging technologies and views that sought to combat famine, plague, religious persecution, and war. In order to understand scientific knowledge as it is today, Leah DeVun asks that we revisit the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the Avignon Papacy through Rupescissa's eyes. The advances he pioneered, along with the exciting strides made by his contemporaries, shed critical light on future developments in medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry.

Author : Urszula Szulakowska
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2017-05-11
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781443893565

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The Alchemical Virgin Mary in the Religious and Political Context of the Renaissance by Urszula Szulakowska Pdf

This study explores the survival of Roman Catholic doctrine and visual imagery in the alchemical treatises composed by members of the Lutheran and Anglican confessions during the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. It discusses the reasons for such unexpected confessional survivals in a time of extreme Protestant iconoclasm and religious reform. The book presents an analysis of the manner in which Catholic doctrines concerning the Virgin Mary, the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist were an essential factor in the development of alchemical theory and illustration from the medieval period to the seventeenth century. The role of the Joachimites, radical members of the Franciscan Order, in the history of alchemy is an important issue. The Apocalypse of St. John (the Book of Revelation) and other scriptural texts and specifically Roman Catholic Marian devotions are also considered regarding their influences on late medieval alchemy and on the sixteenth and seventeenth century alchemical literature composed by Protestants. Additional issues explored here include the role played by alchemy in strengthening the leaders of the European defence against the invading Ottoman Turks, as well as the importance of the figure of the Virgin Mary as the Apocalyptic Woman in the same cause. Special consideration is given to the role played by the apocalyptic Mary within alchemical texts and pictures as an emblem of the mercurial quintessence and also in her form as the Bride of the scriptural Wisdom books which also entered alchemical discourse. Additional issues discussed in this book include the little-regarded problem of “confessional” alchemy, namely, whether there were distinct “Protestant” and “Roman Catholic” types of alchemy. The treatises under consideration include the Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (1419; 1433), the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550), Reusner’s Pandora (1582; 1588) and the Pandora of Faustius (1706), as well as the work of Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, Johann Daniel Mylius, Jacob Boehme and pseudo-Nicolas Flamel, among many others. Their works are contextualised within the religious reforms instigated by Martin Luther, as well as within the unorthodox radical theology devised by Paracelsus and his alchemical followers. The Marian theology of Paracelsus is also of particular interest here.

Author : Alisha Rankin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2021-01-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226744995

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The Poison Trials by Alisha Rankin Pdf

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2012-01-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9781441181831

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The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth-Century England by Anonim Pdf

Author : Tara Nummedal
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2019-03-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780812250893

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Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood by Tara Nummedal Pdf

In 1573, the alchemist Anna Zieglerin gave her patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the recipe for an extraordinary substance she called the lion's blood. She claimed that this golden oil could stimulate the growth of plants, create gemstones, transform lead into the coveted philosophers' stone—and would serve a critical role in preparing for the Last Days. Boldly envisioning herself as a Protestant Virgin Mary, Anna proposed that the lion's blood, paired with her own body, could even generate life, repopulating and redeeming the corrupt world in its final moments. In Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood, Tara Nummedal reconstructs the extraordinary career and historical afterlife of alchemist, courtier, and prophet Anna Zieglerin. She situates Anna's story within the wider frameworks of Reformation Germany's religious, political, and military battles; the rising influence of alchemy; the role of apocalyptic eschatology; and the position of women within these contexts. Together with her husband, the jester Heinrich Schombach, and their companion and fellow alchemist Philipp Sommering, Anna promised her patrons at the court of Wolfenbüttel spiritual salvation and material profit. But her compelling vision brought with it another, darker possibility: rather than granting her patrons wealth or redemption, Anna's alchemical gifts might instead lead to war, disgrace, and destruction. By 1575, three years after Anna's arrival at court, her enemies had succeeded in turning her from holy alchemist into poisoner and sorceress, culminating in Anna's arrest, torture, and public execution. In her own life, Anna was a master of self-fashioning; in the centuries since her death, her story has been continually refashioned, making her a fitting emblem for each new age. Interweaving the history of science, gender, religion, and politics, Nummedal recounts how one resourceful woman's alchemical schemes touched some of the most consequential matters in Reformation Germany.

Author : Lyke de Vries
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2021-12-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004249394

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Reformation, Revolution, Renovation by Lyke de Vries Pdf

At the centre of the Rosicrucian manifestos was a call for ‘general reformation’. In Reformation, Revolution, Renovation, the first book-length study of this topic, Lyke de Vries demonstrates the unique position of the Rosicrucian call for reform in the transformative context of the early seventeenth century. The manifestos, commonly interpreted as either Lutheran or esoteric, are here portrayed as revolutionary mission statements which broke dramatically with Luther’s reform ideals. Their call for reform instead resembles a variety of late medieval and early modern dissenting traditions as well as the heterodox movement of Paracelsianism. Emphasising the universal character of the Rosicrucian proposal for change, this new genealogy of the core idea sheds fresh light on the vexed question of the manifestos’ authorship and helps explain their tumultuous reception by both those who welcomed and those who deplored them.

Author : Jennifer M. Rampling
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 427 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2023-03-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226826547

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The Experimental Fire by Jennifer M. Rampling Pdf

A 400-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects. Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.

Author : Jay Weidner,Vincent Bridges
Publisher : Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2003-12-10
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 089281084X

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The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye by Jay Weidner,Vincent Bridges Pdf

Decodes the message held by this enigmatic monument, revealing the alchemical secret of time and the fate of humanity.

Author : Marcus Harmes,Victoria Bladen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317048374

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Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England by Marcus Harmes,Victoria Bladen Pdf

For the people of early modern England, the dividing line between the natural and supernatural worlds was both negotiable and porous - particularly when it came to issues of authority. Without a precise separation between ’science’ and ’magic’ the realm of the supernatural was a contested one, that could be used both to bolster and challenge various forms of authority and the exercise of power in early modern England. In order to better understand these issues, this volume addresses a range of questions regarding the ways in which ideas, beliefs and constructions of the supernatural threatened and conflicted with authority, as well as how the power of the supernatural could be used by authorities (monarchical, religious, legal or familial) to reinforce established social norms. Drawing upon a range of historical, literary and dramatic texts the collection reveals intersecting early modern anxieties in relation to the supernatural, issues of control and the exercise of power at different levels of society, from the upper echelons of power at court to local and domestic spaces, and in a range of publication contexts - manuscript sources, printed prose texts and the early modern stage. Divided into three sections - ’Magic at Court’, ’Performance, Text and Language’ and ’Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body’ - the volume offers a broad cultural approach to the subject that reflects current research by a range of early modern scholars from the disciplines of history and literature. By bringing scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue, the case studies presented here generate fresh insights within and between disciplines and different methodologies and approaches, which are mutually illuminating.

Author : Curtis Runstedler
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2023-03-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783031266065

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Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature by Curtis Runstedler Pdf

This book explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the fifteenth century, namely alchemical dialogues between Morienus and Merlin, Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves, and an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s poem The Churl and the Bird. It investigates how this exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding poetic narratives containing alchemy, as well as enabling the reader to reassess the understanding and expectations of science and narrative within medieval English poetry.

Author : William R. Newman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 559 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2018-12-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780691174877

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Newton the Alchemist by William R. Newman Pdf

A book that finally demystifies Newton’s experiments in alchemy When Isaac Newton’s alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking. No longer the exemplar of Enlightenment rationality, the legendary physicist suddenly became “the last of the magicians.” Newton the Alchemist unlocks the secrets of Newton’s alchemical quest, providing a radically new understanding of the uncommon genius who probed nature at its deepest levels in pursuit of empirical knowledge. In this evocative and superbly written book, William Newman blends in-depth analysis of newly available texts with laboratory replications of Newton’s actual experiments in alchemy. He does not justify Newton’s alchemical research as part of a religious search for God in the physical world, nor does he argue that Newton studied alchemy to learn about gravitational attraction. Newman traces the evolution of Newton’s alchemical ideas and practices over a span of more than three decades, showing how they proved fruitful in diverse scientific fields. A precise experimenter in the realm of “chymistry,” Newton put the riddles of alchemy to the test in his lab. He also used ideas drawn from the alchemical texts to great effect in his optical experimentation. In his hands, alchemy was a tool for attaining the material benefits associated with the philosopher’s stone and an instrument for acquiring scientific knowledge of the most sophisticated kind. Newton the Alchemist provides rare insights into a man who was neither Enlightenment rationalist nor irrational magus, but rather an alchemist who sought through experiment and empiricism to alter nature at its very heart.

Author : Meredith K. Ray
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674504233

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Daughters of Alchemy by Meredith K. Ray Pdf

Meredith Ray shows that women were at the vanguard of empirical culture during the Scientific Revolution. They experimented with medicine and alchemy at home and in court, debated cosmological discoveries in salons and academies, and in their writings used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for women’s intellectual equality to men.

Author : Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort,Kees Versteegh,Joas Wagemakers
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2011-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004206786

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The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam by Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort,Kees Versteegh,Joas Wagemakers Pdf

This volume provides new insights into the transmission of the textual sources of Islam and combines this with the dynamics of these scriptures by paying close attention to how believers interpret and apply them.

Author : Mayte Green-Mercado
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-01-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501741470

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Visions of Deliverance by Mayte Green-Mercado Pdf

In Visions of Deliverance, Mayte Green-Mercado traces the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts known as joferes through formal and informal networks of merchants, Sufis, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians across the Mediterranean from Constantinople and Venice to Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco cultural and political resistance, reconstructing both productive and oppositional interactions and exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the early modern Mediterranean. Challenging a historiography that has primarily understood Morisco apocalyptic thought as the expression of a defeated group that was conscious of the loss of their culture and identity, Green-Mercado depicts Moriscos not simply as helpless victims of Christian oppression but as political actors whose use of end-times discourse helped define and construct their society anew. Visions of Deliverance helps us understand the implications of confessionalization, forced conversion, and assimilation in the early modern period and the intellectual and theological networks that shaped politics and identity across the Mediterranean in this era.

Author : Veronika Wieser,Vincent Eltschinger,Johann Heiss
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 1181 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2020-07-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110593587

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Cultures of Eschatology by Veronika Wieser,Vincent Eltschinger,Johann Heiss Pdf

In all religions, in the medieval West as in the East, ideas about the past, the present and the future were shaped by expectations related to the End. The volumes Cultures of Eschatology explore the many ways apocalyptic thought and visions of the end intersected with the development of pre-modern religio-political communities, with social changes and with the emergence of new intellectual and literary traditions. The two volumes present a wide variety of case studies from the early Christian communities of Antiquity, through the times of the Islamic invasion and the Crusades and up to modern receptions, from the Latin West to the Byzantine Empire, from South Yemen to the Hidden Lands of Tibetan Buddhism. Examining apocalypticism, messianism and eschatology in medieval Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist communities, the contributions paint a multi-faceted picture of End-Time scenarios and provide their readers with a broad array of source material from different historical contexts. The first volume, Empires and Scriptural Authorities, examines the formation of literary and visual apocalyptic traditions, and the role they played as vehicles for defining a community’s religious and political enemies. The second volume, Time, Death and Afterlife, focuses on key topics of eschatology: death, judgment, afterlife and the perception of time and its end. It also analyses modern readings and interpretations of eschatological concepts.