Skip to content

Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation Hardcover - 1997

by Andrew Weeks


From the publisher

Paracelsus is regarded as one of the great medical innovators of all time, as a prototype of Goethe's Faust and as a founder of German Renaissance nature philosophy. Recently, his role in the popular "radical Reformation" that coincided with but went beyond Luther's church reform has been recognized as well. A legendary wanderer and rebel, he is an author of undisputed importance, but also one clouded by puzzling ambiguities. Based on a close examination and revised dating of Paracelsus's writings, this book rejects certain myths concerning the author's scientific orientation and experience of nature. The genesis of his thought is traced to his responses to sectarian conflicts of the early Reformation. One can characterize Paracelsus's project as that of a radical theorist who transgressed the boundaries of disciplines and seized upon the irreducible particularities of his phenomena--the transmuted disease or the unrecognized female pathology--to challenge the established order and ideology.

From the rear cover

Paracelsus is regarded as one of the great medical innovators of all time, as a prototype of Goethe's Faust and as a founder of German Renaissance nature philosophy. Recently, his role in the popular "radical Reformation" that coincided with but went beyond Luther's church reform has been recognized as well. A legendary wanderer and rebel, he is an author of undisputed importance, but also one clouded by puzzling ambiguities. Based on a close examination and revised dating of Paracelsus's writings, this book rejects certain myths concerning the author's scientific orientation and experience of nature. The genesis of his thought is traced to his responses to sectarian conflicts of the early Reformation. One can characterize Paracelsus's project as that of a radical theorist who transgressed the boundaries of disciplines and seized upon the irreducible particularities of his phenomena - the transmuted disease or the unrecognized female pathology - to challenge the established order and ideology.

Details

  • Title Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation
  • Author Andrew Weeks
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Pages 250
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, U.S.A
  • Date 1997-01
  • ISBN 9780791431474 / 0791431479
  • Weight 1.09 lbs (0.49 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.26 x 6.18 x 0.8 in (23.52 x 15.70 x 2.03 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Paracelsus, Philosophy, Renaissance
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 96016616
  • Dewey Decimal Code 199.494

About the author

Andrew Weeks teaches German at Illinois State University. His books published by SUNY Press include Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic and German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History.