Recent 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 â across time and place â 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.
Dmitri Levitin is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He works on the history of pre-modern knowledge; his most recent monograph is entitled The Kingdom of Darkness (Cambridge, 2021).
Ian Maclean is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and an honorary Professor of the University of St Andrews. He works on the intellectual traditions of the higher disciplines, and on book history. His most recent monograph is Episodes in the Life of the Early Modern Learned Book (Brill, 2020).
1ââNational Traditions in Scholarship
âThe French and Dutch Schools of Classical Scholarship at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
ââFloris Verhaart
2âSex and the Classics
âThe Approaches of Early Modern Humanists to Ancient Sexuality
ââKaren Hollewand
PART 2 The Arts
3ââThree Days and Three Nights in the Heart of the Earthâ
âChronological Debates over the Period of Christâs Rest in the Tomb in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
ââC. Philipp E. Nothaft
4âThe Early Modern Study of Ancient Measures in Comparative Perspective
âA Preliminary Investigation
ââCesare Pastorino
5âThe Pentateuch and the Immortality of the Soul in England and the Dutch Republic
âThe Confessionalisation of a Claim
ââMichelle Pfeffer
PART 3 Medicine
6âSacred Medicine in Early Modern Europe
ââJetze Touber
7âThe Reception of Hippocrates by Physicians at the End of the Seventeenth Century
âA Comparative Study
ââIan Maclean
PART 4 Theology
8âWhatâs in a Name? Essenes, Therapeutae, and Monks in the Christian Imagination, c.1500â1700
ââJan Machielsen
9âPublishing a Prohibited Criticism
âRichard Simon, Pierre Bayle, and Erudition in Late Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Culture
ââTimothy Twining
10âEuropean Scholarship on the Formation of the New Testament Canon, c.1700
âPolemic, Erudition, Emulation
ââDmitri Levitin
Index
Anyone interested in the histories of pre-modern knowledge and classical reception.