Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe

most of this is by German doctors idealizing Paracelsus as a forerunner of their own practices. Heinz Schott takes this further by arguing that the occult and religious content of Paracelsus's writings is reflected in modern psychosomatic medicine. By contrast, Herbert Breger focuses on leading "Paracelsians" of the seventeenth century and suggests that their willingness to identify with a Paracelsian (i.e. non-mechanistic) style of thought may have something to do with their individual personalities and ways of dealing with their emotions. While several authors (mostly in Grell) question the possibility of ever knowing the "real" Paracelsus, others (particularly in Schott and Zinguer) seem to have no difficulty in studying what this historical figure believed and wrote about. Lucien Braun (Schott and Zinguer) takes Paracelsus's concept of "matrix" as a way into analysing his rhetorical style and structure of thought. Gunhild Porksen (Schott and Zinguer) argues that Paracelsus considered vision the most important sense, the eye being the central organ of scientific knowledge, while Ute Gause (Grell) examines the relationship between his understanding of God's light and its implications for heavenly magic. Hartmut Rudolf (Grell) shows how Paracelsus's concept of the Eucharist provides a context for his anthropology, which according to Udo Benzenhofer and Karin Finsterbusch (Schott and Zinguer), was distinctly antiSemetic in tone. Authors in both volumes appear to agree that later reactions to "Paracelsianism" (however this may be construed) can be properly understood only in ideological terms. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Grell) provides an extremely useful overview of the European political and religious context which suggests why it was chiefly Calvinist doctors who identified with the Paracelsian cause between 1600 and 1650. Allen Debus (Grell) names the best-known of these figures, as well as drawing our attention to Spanish and Turkish physicians who came to Paracelsian ideas in the latter part of the century. All but two of the remaining articles focus on individuals at the level of city and court. Stephen Bamforth, Ilana Zinguer and Didier Kahn (all in Schott and Zinguer) take a fresh look at chemical medicine in the French court, Bruce Moran (Grell), Frank Hieronymus, Joachim Telle and Joseph Levi (Schott and Zinguer) consider the impact of Paracelsian doctrine in German-speaking cities, while Grell himself shows how Danish doctors stripped Paracelsianism of its radical elements before taking it on as a state orthodoxy. The two articles which do not fit neatly into this overall summary are Roland Edighoffer's study of a Paracelsian enigma in the Chemical wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (Schott and Zinguer), and Francis McKee's account of the influence of Paracelsianism on seventeenth-century cookery books (Grell). In sum, these collections demonstrate the lively state of Paracelsus studies at present and the important contribution that historians of medicine are making to this field.