There have been many books written about Martin Luther’s Swiss-German contemporary, the physician and lay theologian Theophrastus von Hohenheim, widely known as Paracelsus. Some of them are intended mainly for specialists in the history of science and medicine and scholars of the Reformation, but over the past century and a half, there have also appeared popular biographies, intended for readers unfamiliar with the storied medical iconoclast and revolutionary thinker. Bruce Moran’s Paracelsus strives to combine these genres, presenting the life of the man as best as can be assembled from the scraps of fact and folklore that remain, placing these in the social, intellectual, religious and specifically alchemical-medical context of the late Renaissance and early Reformation.