Abstract Historians have often represented prayer as an instrumental response to illness. We argue instead that prayer, together with physic, was part of larger regimes preserve health and prevent disease. focus on early modern England, through the philosophical writings physician, Robert Fludd, medical records clergyman, Richard Napier. Fludd depicted a fortress illness invasion by demons; phy...

Despite decades of research, demographic historians are still uncertain about mortality trends and determinants in early New England. Although researchers agree that New England mortality was low relative to other regions of early America in the seventeenth century, they disagree about the direction of mortality trends over the course of the eighteenth century. Community-based reconstitution st...

The seventeenth century witnessed striking transformations in the science of mechanics: whereas Renaissance authors of the previous century were primarily concemed with restoring and extending the achievements of Antiquity, following largely in the same track, seventeenth-century practitioners brought meehanics to radically new domains, such as the mathematical investigation of motion in its ma...

Following in the footsteps of the Stockport Research Group, who made extensive use of probate inventories in their Stockport in the mid-seventeenth century, 1660– 1669 (S. McKenn and C. Nunn eds, Stockport, 1992), Paul Anderton provides a detailed analysis of 59 Nantwich inventories for the same decade along similar lines, with special reference to agriculture. Comparisons are made between Nant...

After relatively rapid population growth in the later sixteenth century and slower growth in the first four decades of the seventeenth century, the midseventeenth century nationally saw growth change to stagnation and even loss. Falling fertility, changes in nuptiality or worsening mortality, or a combination of all these, could have caused this phenomenon. The aim of this article is to examine...

• Why did Europeans begin to amass overseas empires during the sixteenth century, and what effects did this experience have on both the Europeans and conquered peoples? • What role did religion play in the European wars of the sixteenth century and the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century? • How did the religious policy, the foreign policy, and the governments of Philip II of Spain and ...

also how the teachers were far from being mere theorists but were concerned also with the consequences of their interpretations for medical practice. When these lectures were delivered is difficult to decide, for there are hints both for and against a date around 550. While the commentary on On the nature of the child is edited from the single surviving manuscript, the other two have a much mor...

Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, worked at the heart of seventeenth-century scientific debates — in shadow her brother, Robert Boyle.

In a recent exhibit at the New York Academy of Medicine, I examined the evolution ofteratology (i.e., the study of perceived abnormalities in the natural world, both real and imagined) through the eyes of physicians and philosophers. Based on the exhibit, this paper describes the major interpretations of teratology from Antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century. The term "monster," which i...