Thomas Erastus Research Articles

Anti-Paracelsianism from Conrad Gessner to Robert Boyle

This article surveys the current knowledge of the anti-Paracelsian movement from a confessional perspective. It outlines the rise of the critique of Paracelsus by academic physicians such as Conrad Gessner, Thomas Erastus’s vociferous demonization, and an ambivalent Catholic reaction. Andreas Libavius and other chymical theorists remained critical of Paracelsus’s natural philosophy while engaging aspects of his alchemy. The cumulative impact reveals a widespread anti-Paracelsian discourse, which escalated in the seventeenth century due to the growing popularity of Paracelsian spiritualism.

New sources for history of early modern astronomy

Several comets and new stars drew European eyes between 1572 and 1618, a period of new worlds, warring Empires, and Christian schism. Historians of astronomy have, understandably, centred on luminaries like Kepler and Galileo to see how objects like the supernova of 1604 cracked the crystalline purity of the Aristotelian worldview. More recently, following Sarah Schechner's study of popular interest in comets (1997), we have begun to learn how such celestial novelties mattered throughout European culture. Tessicini and Boner's collection of essays spans these two approaches, connecting the history of celestial novelties with broader intellectual, political, and religious histories of early modern Europe.One theme is the ways early moderns turned to history to make sense of comets. Adam Mosley opens with a study of how the historical record was used to debate the worth of astrology. Antoine Mizauld and those inspired by Melanchthon found that history supports the inference that comets do, in fact, portend human affairs. Others, from Thomas Erastus to Thaddaeus Hegacius, disagreed, based on the same evidence as extracted from the new genre of comet catalogues. Not that astrologers grew scarce during the period; Tayra M.C. Lanuza Navarro and Victor Navarro Brotons show that commentaries on comets written in Spain were driven by astrological assumptions; history showed the validity of astrological prediction and heavenly conjunctions in turn explained the great turning points in history. As Nick Jardine argues, Christoph Rothman's Dialexis on the comet of 1585 exemplifies historia as collections of observationes .History also mattered in political and confessional battles. Boner and Francesco Barreca together unfold the rhetorical layers of Kepler's dedicatory letters to Rudolph II, showing how Kepler coupled the comet of 1604 with the rise and fall of war with the Ottomans and the Hungarian Rebellion, with the comet and conflicts all fading by 1606. Celestial novelties and their meaning for empire gave Kepler a chance to defend, at one stroke, his salary and the new Copernican theory. The science of the stars divided along confessional lines, as Isabelle Pantin shows for the Carmelite Francesco Giuntini, suspected of Lutheran sympathies for his astrology. To answer suspicions, he shored up positions associated with Gemma Frisius and Melanchthon using a longer tradition of ancient and medieval authorities, thus blurring confessional lines. Elide Casali similarly finds Christian motivations for astronomy across the period, despite great changes in the nature of astronomy. In response to the comet of 1577, Italian comet literature presented the interpreter of the stars as the Christian sapiens . But after 1618--after the study of the stars had been mathematized and mechanized, Casali contends--Italian comet literature evinced the same 'Christian astrology', so that 'religious and devotional sentiments' drove accounts of comets no less than before (131).Several contributions describe what celestial novelties meant for medicine, natural philosophy, and planetary theory. John Henry describes the French physician Jean Fernel's De abditis rerum causis , which underscored the ongoing significance of celestial influences for reformist approaches to medicine. …

Corporeal Elements and Principles in the Learned German Chymical Tradition

This paper explores diverse conceptions of the physicality and tangibility of elements and principles in early modern chymistry. By tracing the development of natural philosophical and corpuscular ideas about material elements and principles among several physicans and chymists, including Thomas Erastus, Andreas Libavius, Daniel Sennert, and Anton Günther Billich, this article locates a learned tradition that developed predominantly in Germany, and which directly challenged a common understanding of matter held by major Paracelsians as well as authors from the French textbook tradition. Likewise, conceptions of incorporeal elements or principles are shown to have developed from the ideas of Paracelsus and Petrus Severinus, whereas authors in the learned tradition emphasised a particular interpretation of Aristotle. The article concludes by suggesting that chymical interpretations of material composition had an important influence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that this provides further evidence that the so-called “compositional revolution” in chemistry was well underway prior to the eighteenth century.

Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation. By Charles D. Gunnoe Jr. Brill’s Series in Church History, volume 48. Edited by Wim Janse.Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xvi+525. $163.00.

<i>Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation</i>. By Charles D. Gunnoe Jr. Brill’s Series in Church History, volume 48. Edited by Wim Janse.Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xvi+525. $163.00.

:Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation. Brill's Series in Church History 48

:<i>Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation. Brill's Series in Church History 48</i>

The Evolution of Erastianism: Hugo Grotius’s Engagement with Thomas Erastus

This article tracts the development of Erastianism from the Heidelberg disciplinary controversy of 1568 to the works of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). Thomas Erastus (1524-1583), a Swiss-Reformed Physician and lay theologian working in the Electoral Palatinate, developed a theory of church-state relations which privileged the magistrate and denied independent disciplinary power to the church consistory. His program served as a counter-ideology to the prevailing disciplining urges of International Calvinism. Such Erastian ideas, whether from Erastus or other Swiss theorists such as Rudolf Gwalther, resonated with Dutch Libertines and Arminians before Grotius wrote his strongly Erastian Ordinum Pietas in 1613. While the Ordinum Pietas reveals only limited dependence on Erastus, other works of Grotius such as De Imperio display significant engagement or parallel themes with Erastus’s thought. “Grotian Erastianism,” with a healthy measure of Hebraism, is an apt descriptor for the seventeenth-century theories of church-state relations which favored the magistrate.

Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation. By Charles GunnoeJr. Brill's Series in Church History. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011. xvi + 520 pp. $163.00 cloth.

Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in the Second Reformation. By Charles GunnoeJr. Brill's Series in Church History. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011. xvi + 520 pp. $163.00 cloth.

Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate. A Renaissance physician in the second reformation. By Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. (Brill's Series in Church History, 48.) Pp. xvi+525. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2010. €119. 978 90 04 18792 4; 1572 4107

Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate. A Renaissance physician in the second reformation. By Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. (Brill's Series in Church History, 48.) Pp. xvi+525. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2010. €119. 978 90 04 18792 4; 1572 4107

Thomas More and Shakespeare: A Proposal for Furthering an Inquiry

The affinities linking as well as differences dividing the thought of Thomas More and the thought of Shakespeare deserve our attention for the light such comparative scrutiny casts upon each man’s position with respect to issues of their time and in regard to questions continually beckoning to be thought through once more. Their mutual concerns include moral cultivation, statesmanship, the character of regimes in health and in disorder, the nature of law divine and human, the relation that should be established between Church and State. An inquiry into both More’s explicitly conveyed arguments together with Shakespeare’s largely implicit course of reasoning should begin by noting their apparent agreement upon moral and civil concerns. Yet such an investigation should proceed to matters bearing upon faith and reason, issues it appears are viewed differently by the two thinkers. Of particular interest the divergence that comes to sight in comparing More’s dedication to preserving independence of church from civil authority with Shakespeare’s apparent endorsement of a Tudor Erastian settlement. 1 1 By the phrase here employed I mean to denote in a general way the doctrine of church submission to civil authority put forward by Thomas Erastus, the Swiss theologian who wrote in the latter half of the sixteenth century. His name becomes (though not during More’s life) synonymous with the view that the political sovereign possesses authority to prescribe doctrines of faith and modes of worship to those subject to that sovereign’s jurisdiction. In associating this doctrine, as I do subsequently, with caesaropapism, I am aware that the Erastian need not embrace all the tenets of the caesaropapist.

Antiparacelsismus und Dreieinigkeit. Medizinischer Antitrinitarismus von Thomas Erastus (1524–1583) bis Ernst Soner (1572–1605)

There were close relationships between Renaissance medicine and antitrinitarianism in 16th and 17th century. Forming an important part of the radical reformation antitrinitarianism won many disciples in the Holy Roman Empire and proved its attraction for physicians. This paper centers on two public scandals in Heidelberg and Altdorf involving the reknown university professors and physicians Thomas Erastus and Ernst Soner. Michael Servetus' new concept of the blood flow through the lungs was discussed in Heidelberg. In Altdorf Caspar Hofmann, Soner's colleague, developed a special theory of the blood flow and corresponded with William Harvey. Erastus and Soner sharply critisized the hermectical and neoplatonical ideas of Paracelsus. Although sympathizing with antitrinitarianism they denounced the Paracelsians as heretics. The Polish antitrinitarians were called Socinians, from Faustus Socinus. Their doctrine tended to be Aristotelic and rationalistic. Soner combined a socinian theology with a heterodox Aristotelianism referring to Andrea Cesalpino. Again after Soner's death some of his pupils and other physicians advocated socinianism in Gdansk (Martin Ruar, Florian Krause, Daniel Zwicker, Valentin Baumgart).

Thomas Erastus oor die struktuur van die gemeenskap

Thomas Erastus on the church, the rulers and the community In this, largely descriptive paper, the views of Thomas Erastus (1520-1583) of Heidelberg, are discussed. Erastus' views on the church, the rulers and the community are put forward in his Treatise Explicatio gravissimae of 1568-69, published in 1589. It is clear that Erastus depends on the Zurich covenant-theology in his view that the community is essentially a Christian community ruled by the pius magistratus. In this community the church does not appear as a separate coetus or societas, but is ruled by the godly prince who rules according to God's law. Erastus' view gained popularity in the ecclesia AngUcam and was, to a certain extent, also a plea for the divine rights of kings.