Description
Book SynopsisRecent research has established the continued importance of engagement with the classical tradition to the formation of scholarly, philosophical, theological, and scientific knowledge well into the eighteenth century. The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age is the first attempt to adopt a comparative approach to this phenomenon. An international team of scholars explores the differences and similarities – across time and place – in how the study and use of ancient texts and ideas shaped a wide range of fields: nascent classics, sexuality, chronology, metrology, the study of the soul, medicine, the history of Judaeo-Christian interaction, and biblical criticism. By adopting a comparative approach, this volume brings out some of the most important factors in explaining the contours of early modern intellectual life. Contributors: Karen Hollewand, Dmitri Levitin, Jan Machielsen, Ian Maclean, C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Cesare Pastorino, Michelle Pfeffer, Jetze Touber, Timothy Twining, and Floris Verhaart.
Table of ContentsList of Figures Introduction Dmitri Levitin PART 1 Secular Classical Scholarship 1 National Traditions in Scholarship The French and Dutch Schools of Classical Scholarship at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century Floris Verhaart 2 Sex and the Classics The Approaches of Early Modern Humanists to Ancient Sexuality Karen Hollewand PART 2 The Arts 3 “Three Days and Three Nights in the Heart of the Earth” Chronological Debates over the Period of Christ’s Rest in the Tomb in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries C. Philipp E. Nothaft 4 The Early Modern Study of Ancient Measures in Comparative Perspective A Preliminary Investigation Cesare Pastorino 5 The Pentateuch and the Immortality of the Soul in England and the Dutch Republic The Confessionalisation of a Claim Michelle Pfeffer PART 3 Medicine 6 Sacred Medicine in Early Modern Europe Jetze Touber 7 The Reception of Hippocrates by Physicians at the End of the Seventeenth Century A Comparative Study Ian Maclean PART 4 Theology 8 What’s in a Name? Essenes, Therapeutae, and Monks in the Christian Imagination, c.1500–1700 Jan Machielsen 9 Publishing a Prohibited Criticism Richard Simon, Pierre Bayle, and Erudition in Late Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Culture Timothy Twining 10 European Scholarship on the Formation of the New Testament Canon, c.1700 Polemic, Erudition, Emulation Dmitri Levitin Index
