Paracelsus’s concept of seeds is an important contribution toRenaissance theories of matter. Unlike the alchemists’ notion of metalseeds, it has a strong Christian orientation, based on a particular inter-pretation of the biblical Creation story. It is in this cosmogonical aspectthat Paracelsian seeds are more akin to the seminal reasons of Aug…[Read more]

In his “Platonic Theology on the Immortality of Souls” (1482), Marsilio Ficino defended the idea of the world’s universal animation. In this purpose, he especially developed a ‘Platonic’ interpretation of spontaneous generation, relying not only on the notions of Ideas and the World-Soul but also on his own theory of the ‘earth’s soul’ (anima te…[Read more]

1. Introduction
2. The Commentary on Plato’s Symposium
3. The Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus
4. The Platonic Theology
5. The De vita coelitus comparanda
6. The Commentary on the Enneades of Plotinus
7. The Sources for his Concept of Seeds

Although the “sceptical chymist” Robert Boyle is generally known as an experimental natural philosopher, he was also the child of a culture of bookish erudition. By quoting diverse classical, medieval, Renaissance and contemporary authors, he gave to his readers the impression that he could avail himself of a very wide range of sources. In some…[Read more]

Known under the latinized name Quercetanus, the French Paracelsian Joseph Du Chesne (1546-1609) was a physician and political agent of the first French protestant king Henri IV. He exerted a profound influence on Paracelsianism, or rather the chemical philosophy of the beginning of the 17th century. His main work “Ad veritatem hermeticae…[Read more]

The Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) tried to interpret the Creation of the world and to explain the origin of life in the last book of his geocosmic encyclopedia, “Mundus subterraneus” (Amsterdam, 1664–1665). His interpretation largely depended on the ‘concept of seeds’ which was derived from the tradition of Renaissance ‘chymic…[Read more]

The work of Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), professor of medicine at the Lutheran University of Wittenberg, encompasses the cluster of issues raised by the early seventeenth-century intersection of matter theories and the life sciences, where the origin of life emerged as one of the most important questions. There the belief in spontaneous generation…[Read more]

Belonging to the very first generation of medical humanists active in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century, Nicolò Leoniceno was prolific in producing widely-used translations of Galen’s works. By examining the confrontation between the medieval Arabo-Latin tradition and Renaissance humanism in natural philosophy, this article aims to an…[Read more]

Introduction of the special fascicle “The Marginalization of Astrology”

1. Introduction
2. Leoniceno’s Naturalistic Interpretation
3. Fernel’s Astral Medicine
4. Mizauld’s Harmony between Heaven and Earth
5. Cardano’s Theory of Cosmic Heat
6. Gemma and the Apogee of Astral Medicine
7. The Paracelsians and the Quest for the Universal Medicine”

In 1629, a strange treatise, entitled “Curiositez inouyes,” or, “Unheard-of Curiosities,” was published in Paris. Its author was Jacques Gaffarel, a French orientalist and a friend of atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). This work of over six hundred pages in octavo was devoted to the astrology, horoscope and talismans of the Orientals, that is, t…[Read more]

This paper aims to spotlight some important, but neglected, aspects of early modern interactions between matter theories and the life sciences. It will trace the ways in which atomistic or corpuscular modes of reasoning were adopted to explain the origin of life. To that end this paper will examine three seventeenth-century natural philosophers:…[Read more]

Sixteenth-century natural philosophers and physicians crafted novel ideas on bodies and their internal powers. Their theories often went far beyond the framework of the traditional Aristotelian perspective, influencing the broader philosophical scene of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the principal actors in Renaissance…[Read more]

A pregnant woman encounters a wolf in the woods. She is so scared that her strong emotion of fear imprints the wolf’s morphological traces on the fetus in her womb. Another pregnant woman craves strawberries or cherries so intensely that she leaves certain marks or impressions of these fruits on the fetus. The belief that the power of maternal e…[Read more]

In this paper I will address the question of the origin of the soul and the intellect in human and animal generation, as it appeared in medical debates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. How did this issue affect the traditional boundary firmly established between human beings and animals? How was the passage of Aristotle’s “…[Read more]

In his “Generation of Animals” 2.3, Aristotle suggested that the nature of the heat contained in the seed along with the pneuma corresponds by analogy to the “element of the stars,” which is the celestial substance, aether. A cosmological dimension is thus introduced in the middle of an embryological discourse. The aim of the present article is…[Read more]