Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Paracelsismus (review)

Heinz Schott and Ilana Zinguer, eds. Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Paracelsismus. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 86. Leiden: Brill, 1998. xii + 274 pp. Ill. $106.00; Nlg. 180.00.

This volume consists of a collection of papers in German, French, and English that first were heard as part of a symposium held at Bonn and Heidelberg in 1995, supported by the German Israeli Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The essays included in the edited work convincingly cast the works of Paracelsus, and the controversies that surrounded them, as an international phenomenon. Several discussions concern the explication of particular texts, or focus on specific parts of Paracelsus's natural and medical philosophy. Gunhild Pörksen investigates Paracelsus's comprehension of vision as the primary means of knowledge, and describes the extension of the realm of perception to special intuitions of unseen relationships in nature. Heinz Schott explores the tangle of ideas that relate to defining magic, belief, and superstition in the context of Paracelsus's Philosophia magna, where what might be called clairvoyant insights mixed with demonic conceptions and traditional superstitions. Lucien Braun, meanwhile, focuses on the Paracelsian theory of the "Matrix"--that is, the "smallest world" within the microcosm, and discusses how the uterus was thought to control feminine sentiment as well as the suffering and illnesses related specifically to women.

Two essays deal with historical-critical themes related to the milieu of Paracelsian writings: Frank Hieronymus reconstructs the publication history of Paracelsian works in Basel; Joachim Telle focuses on the life and work of the sixteenth-century physician Bartholomaeus Carrichter, who, it is argued, developed a specific kind of pharmacy based upon his own medical views and not upon those of Paracelsus. (A list of Carrichter's works is supplied by Julian Paulus.) Ilana Zinguer describes the conflict between Jacques Aubert, a critic of contemporary alchemy, and Joseph Duchesne (Quercetanus); she argues on the basis of an analysis of relevant texts in the quarrel that Duchesne was linked in great part to his advocacy of the practical application of chemistry in medicine. Didier Kahn follows the proceedings against Roche Le Baillif by the Parisian Faculty of Medicine in their failed attempt to close out Paracelsians from the medical profession, delivering a microhistory of the affair and a chronology of events gleaned from a detailed reading of documents derived from the Parlement de Paris. Stephan Bamforth recounts the debate over chemical medicine at the court of Louis XIII, describing the position of the French Paracelsian Gabriel Castaigne (or Castagne) in relation to the views of the chemical physician Nicolas Abraham de la Framboisière. The importance of Paracelsus for the authors of the original Rosicrucian manifestos is explored by Roland Edighoffer.

Two articles, one by Udo Benzenhöfer and Karin Finsterbusch and the other by Joseph Levi, deal with the issue of anti-Semitism in Paracelsus and in the medical community of the early modern period. Levi focuses on the struggles between German physicians and their Jewish colleagues in Frankfurt am Main in the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that economic reasons were decisive for an anti-Semitic campaign in the city. Most prominently, the physician Ludwig von Hoernick made use of both anti-Paracelsian and Paracelsian reasoning in order to protest against Jewish physicians, particularly Joseph Shelomo Delmedigo, a city physician of the Jewish community in Frankfurt who was inspired by natural magic and alchemy. Benzenhöfer and Finsterbusch, on the other hand, deal directly with the question of anti-Semitism in the works of Paracelsus. Paracelsus, of course, figured prominently in the rhetoric of the National Socialists, some picturing him as a precursor of National Socialism itself, others finding in him a champion in the struggle against Judaism. The German physician...