The Character of Seventeenth-Century French Protestantism and the Place of the Huguenot Refuge following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes Thirty-seven years ago the late Emile-G. Leonard regretted that there were so few historical studies of seventeenth-century French Protestantism and no general 1 historical synthesis for the period as a whole. At the time Leonard's observation was accurate. Seventeenth-century French Protestantism traditionally remained a questionable and problematical subject for historians. All too frequently historians neglected it in favor of emphasizing its origins in the second-half of the sixteenth century and its renascence since the French Revolution. When the rare historian broke his silence and considered French Protestantism in the seventeenth-century, was meager and generally ambivalent or negative. The historiographer his treatment of seventeenth-century French Protestantism could only cite the outstanding works of Jean Pannier and Orentin Douen, which taken together emphasized the new pre eminence of Parisian Protestantism in the seventeenth century, and the genuine works of synthesis by John Vienot and Matthieu Lelievre, which again had to be placed side by side in order to complete coverage of the whole of the seventeenth 2 century. The only true intellectual history of seventeenth-century French Protestantism was the study by Albert Monod, which, however, dealt with the second-half of the century and, then, only in the broad context of both Protestant 3 and Catholic thought responding to the challenge of modern rationalism.

Historians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state's foundation and the reign of France's Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV's reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy's department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad. They explore the collection and centralization of information during Torcy's tenure through the creation of a modern state archive, discreet intelligence gathering, and the surveillance and management of the French mails. They also study the postal carriers, couriers, household officers of the royal court, genealogists hired for research, and an informal "brain trust" of experts, and advisors who carried vital information in and out of the department every day. A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, A World of Paper demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.

'the oldest biography of Spinoza', La Vie de Mr. Spinosa, which in the manuscript copies is often followed by L'Esprit de M. Spinosa. Margaret Jacob, in her Radical Enlightenment, contended that the Traite was written by a radical group of Freemasons in The Hague in the early eighteenth century. Silvia Berti has offered evidence it was written by Jan Vroesen. Various discussions in the early eighteenth century consider many possi ble authors from the Renaissance onwards to whom the work might be attributed. The Trois imposteurs has attracted quite a bit of recent attention as one of the most significant irreligious clandestine writings available in the Enlightenment, which is most important for understanding the develop ment of religious scepticism, radical deism, and even atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars for the last couple of decades have been trying to assess when the work was actually written or compiled and by whom. In view of the widespread distribution of manu scripts of the work all over Europe, they have also been seeking to find out who was influenced by the work, and what it represented for its time. Hitherto unknown manuscripts are being turned up in public and private libraries all over Europe and the United States.

The history of the Christian-Jewish relations is full of curious, intense, and occasionally tragic episodes. In the dialectical development of the Western monotheistic religions, Judaism plays the role of the “thesis”, of the origins and background for the rise of Christianity and Islam. With the rise of Christianity, Judaism was progressively marginalized, since it was denied the same essence and validity of Christianity, which grew immensely in terms of spiritual and secular power. Christian scholars since the Middle Ages looked at Judaism as at the “broken staff” in the evolutionist line of religion, to quote the insightful work of the late Frank E. Manuel. At the same time, while re-discovering Judaism, Christian scholars redefined themselves, and Christianity as well. However, while Christianity encompassed many sects and many nations, the relatively weak diversity within Judaism, the religion of a single nation, seemed to hinder its evolution and development. While the intellectual battle was fought in a scholarly way, the emergence of the Christian State condemned the Jews to perpetual discrimination and occasional toleration, until a lay State, Nazi Germany, threatened the survival of the Jewish people. Neutral controversial works became powerful extermination tools when used in the political arena. This volume casts light on some crucial episodes in the long dialectics within the same intellectual and religious framework, touching upon themes such as the conception of time future in the age of Spinoza, the early encounters of Judaism and Christianity in eighteenth-century England, the memory of the Shoah, and the political revolution present in the system of the Jewish Commonwealth. From early to late Modernity, there is a history of friendship and diffidence, mutual understanding and dramatic disagreements, which, even today, largely conditions the Western intellectual world.

Dewey Wallace tells the story of several prominent English Calvinist actors and thinkers in the first generations after the beginning of the Restoration. He seeks to overturn conventional clichés about Calvinism: that it was anti-mystical, that it allowed no scope for the ''ancient theology'' that characterized much of Renaissance learning, that its piety was harshly predestinarian, that it was uninterested in natural theology, and that it had been purged from the established church by the end of the seventeenth century. In the midst of conflicts between Church and Dissent and the intellectual challenges of the dawning age of Enlightenment, Calvinist individuals and groups dealt with deism, anti-Trinitarianism, and scoffing atheism--usually understood as godlessness--by choosing different emphases in their defense and promotion of Calvinist piety and theology. Wallace shows that in each case, there was not only persistence in an earlier Calvinist trajectory, but also a transformation of the Calvinist heritage into a new mode of thinking and acting. The different paths taken illustrate the rich variety of English Calvinism in the period. This study presents description and analysis of the mystical Calvinism of Peter Sterry, the hermeticist Calvinism of Theophilus Gale, the evangelical Calvinism of Joseph Alleine and the circle that promoted his legacy, the natural theology of the moderate Calvinist Presbyterians Richard Baxter, William Bates, and John Howe, and the Church of England Calvinism of John Edwards. Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660-1714 illuminates the religious and intellectual history of the era between the Reformation and modernity, offering fascinating insight into the development of Calvinism and also into English Puritanism as it transitioned into Dissent.

As its name implies, the Reformed tradition grew out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. The Reformed churches consider themselves to be the Catholic Church reformed. The movement originated in the reform efforts of Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) of Zurich and John Calvin (1509-1564) of Geneva. Although the Reformed movement was dependent upon many Protestant leaders, it was Calvin's tireless work as a writer, preacher, teacher, and social and ecclesiastical reformer that provided a substantial body of literature and an ethos from which the Reformed tradition grew. Today, the Reformed churches are a multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational phenomenon. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches contains information on the major personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Reformed churches. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries on leaders, personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Reformed churches.

This book studies the complementary features of the thought of David Hume and Edward Gibbon in the complete range of its confrontation with eighteenth-century Christianity. The ten chapters explore the iconoclasm of these two philosophical historians - Hume as the premier philosopher, Gibbon as the consummate historian - as they labored to `naturalize' the study of Christianity, particularly with attention to its social and political dimensions. No other work deals as comprehensively or thoroughly with the attempt of philosophical history's challenge to Christianity. Belief in miracles and the afterlife, the dimensions of fanaticism and superstition, and the nature of religious persecution were the themes that occupied Hume and Gibbon in the making of their critique of Christianity. This book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship in a number of fields including the history of ideas, religious studies, and philosophy. It will be of interest to philosophers of religion, historians of ideas, eighteenth-century intellectual historians, scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Hume and Gibbon scholars.

Otto von Guericke has been called a neglected genius, overlooked by most modern scholars, scientists, and laymen. He wrote his Experimenta Nova in the seventeenth century in Latin, a dead language for the most part inaccessible to contemporary scientists. Thus isolated by the remoteness of his time and his means of communication, von Guericke has for many years been denied the recognition he deserves in the English speaking world. Indeed, the century in which he lived witnessed the invention of six important and valuable scientific instruments -- the microscope, the telescope, the pendulum clock, the barometer, the thermometer, and the air pump. Von Guericke was associated with the development of the last three of these; he also experimented with a rudimentary electric machine. Thus his Experimenta Nova was an important work, heralding the emerging empiricism of seventeenth century science, and merits this first English translation of von Guericke's magnus opus.

The present volume owes its ongm to a Colloquium on "Alchemy and Chemistry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries", held at the Warburg Institute on 26th and 27th July 1989. The Colloquium focused on a number of selected themes during a closely defined chronological interval: on the relation of alchemy and chemistry to medicine, philosophy, religion, and to the corpuscular philosophy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The relations between Medicina and alchemy in the Lullian treatises were examined in the opening paper by Michela Pereira, based on researches on unpublished manuscript sources in the period between the 14th and 17th centuries. It is several decades since the researches of R.F. Multhauf gave a prominent role to Johannes de Rupescissa in linking medicine and alchemy through the concept of a quinta essentia. Michela Pereira explores the significance of the Lullian tradition in this development and draws attention to the fact that the early Paracelsians had themselves recognized a family resemblance between the works of Paracelsus and Roger Bacon's scientia experimentalis and, indeed, a continuity with the Lullian tradition.