Article ID: CBB594645702

“Immoderatus fervor ad intra coërcendus”: Reactions to Athanasius Kircher’s Central Fire in Jesuit Science and Imagination (2018)

unapi

To explain how the element of fire, after a prevailing association with antichristian attitudes such as atheism and heresy was gradually rehabilitated in early modern natural philosophy and began to be perceived as a providential agent of change, debates in medicine, natural history, chemistry and theory of matter have been called into consideration. Changes of perception toward fire and its meanings that took place in Jesuit natural philosophy and emblematics can provide additional explanations, especially if we focus on the reactions to Athanasius Kircher’s ideas and representations of the Earth’s central fire by authoritative confreres such as Pierre Gautruche, Honoré Fabri, Paolo Casati and Giovanni Battista Tolomei. At the edge of the natural philosophical domain, Franz Reinzer’s Meteorologia philosophico-politica (1697) suggests that a reappraisal of the symbolic meaning of fire as a positive fervor capable of driving man to beneficial enterprises took place in Jesuit moral and didactic literature elaborating on Kircher’s views and images propounded in his Mundus subterraneus. This notion of fire as a christianized agent, however, did not imply any concession to the innovative views on the matter of fire worked out by Seventeenth-century corpuscularists.

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Article Luca Ciancio; Domenico Laurenza (2018) Visual Representation in Earth Sciences History after “The Emergence”: Introduction. Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza (pp. 397-414). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Elazar, Michael
Luzzini, Francesco
Ziller Camenietzki, Carlos
Daxecker, Franz
Hellyer, Marcus A.
Stolzenberg, Daniel
Journals
Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza
Gesnerus
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Science and Education
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
Science in Context
Publishers
University of Notre Dame Press
Gütersloher Verlagshaus
Brill
Springer
Harrassowitz Verlag
Yale University
Concepts
Science and religion
Natural philosophy
Mathematics
Earth sciences
Natural history
Physics
People
Kircher, Athanasius
Galilei, Galileo
Fabri, Honoré
Mersenne, Marin
Casati, Paolo
Aristotle
Time Periods
17th century
16th century
18th century
Early modern
Places
Europe
Rome
Italy
Germany
India
France
Institutions
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
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