Early Modern History

This thesis examines the Solomonic grimoire manuscripts between 1400-1800. Grimoires, as books of magic materials, claim an ancient lineage from the time of King Solomon of Israel.  Modern scholarship has attempted to argue either for or against such a claim, but has not adequately addressed the meanings of imagery and alphabetic symbols contained within each grimoire as an indicator of origin. Through comparisons of several manuscript collections, the basic geometric shapes of circles and squares, that repeatedly form the templates for several objects to be constructed by the magus, are here examined, their various scripts deciphered, and their purpose contextualized for the early modern magician and conjuror. This thesis suggests that the genre of the Solomonic grimoires, in manuscript or printed form, possibly originated only from the 16th-century works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, a conclusion based on use of the Malachim alphabet. Furthermore, the thesis questions grimoire use beyond library transcriptions, the existence of any practice related to them, and the possible origins of the scientific experiment.

This special issue addresses the possible connections and mutual benefits of examining together two analytic concepts – memory and periphery. These concepts receive much attention in various scholarly discussions, yet they have done so rather independently from each other. The potential applications and utilities of combining memory and periphery and the epistemic insights they provide for various disciplins are presented in the different contributions to this issue.

This essay investigates the relationships between early modern alchemy and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, following its introduction to the Christian West by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola at the end of the fifteenth century, and its promulgation by Johannes Reuchlin in the early sixteenth century. New exponents of Christian Cabala were excited by the exegetical methods of Kabbalah, and some alchemists, seeking fresh ways of interpreting enigmatic alchemical texts and the Book of Nature, experimented with novel combinations of the two practices in the hope of gaining insights into their work. While many of these figures were engaged in the broader concerns of Paracelsian philosophy, those experimenting with combinations of alchemy and Cabala nevertheless spanned the spectrum from metallic transmutation to chemical medicine. While focusing on the investigation of kabbalistic elements in alchemical texts produced by Christian authors, rather than the discussion of alchemical material in Jewish Kabbalistic sources, I also briefly consider one apparently authentic Jewish combination of alchemy and Kabbalah: the Aesch Mezareph, published by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth in the Kabbala Denudata.

Historians usually acknowledge the Ottomans’ successful early adoption of firearms, and some even term them a “gunpowder empire,” suggesting that firearms played a crucial role in the Ottoman wars of emergence. However, others maintain that the Ottomans soon lagged behind the paradigmatic states of the “military revolution” and became dependent on European military technology and weaponry. Based on a large body of unpublished source material, this essay challenges both views. It demonstrates the Ottomans’ continued flexibility in adapting and improving upon new weapons, and Istanbul’s self-sufficiency in weapons and ammunition production. Using selected sieges and battles, I argue that, in addition to firearms, factors such as good intelligence, resourceful leadership, a large and disciplined professional army, superior supply and logistics, the combined use of field artillery, infantry firepower, wagon fortresses, and cavalry charges were all important in Ottoman military successes. Regarding the possible relationship between firearms and the growth of the army, older Ottomanist literature explained the increase in the number of musket-bearing infantry janissaries with Istanbul’s need to counter Habsburg infantry volley-fire in the war of 1593-1606 in Hungary. New evidence indicates that the growth of the janissary corps was part of a general military expansion that started in the mid-sixteenth century and accelerated during the Ottomans’ “Thirty Years War” (1578-1611) against the Safavids and Habsburgs.  This expansion reflected both military and socio-economic changes, and cannot be explained simply by “the challenge of the European military revolution,” indeed a reductionist reasoning bordering on technological determinism.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

This study is a preliminary attempt to chart out the manifold ways Ottomans envisioned and imagined the Euro-Christian world during early modern times. Through the study of a selection of various sources ranging from pseudo-historiographic warrior epics to lyric poetry, the main objective will be to expose the multivocality and ambivalence of Ottoman texts dealing – exclusively or partially - with the Western cosmos. By a careful analysis of the narratological structure of specific Ottoman works, the degree to which Euro-Christians had permeated the minds (and souls) of Ottoman-Muslims will be evaluated. The examination of recurrent stock images, stereotypes, and depictions of Euro-Christians will hint at the ways Ottomans constructed and articulated a discourse of alterity based on the juxtaposition of a (pure and ideal) Self against a (reprehensible and threatening) Other. Simultaneously, instances where these seemingly unflinching and fixed boundaries were questioned, challenged, or overlooked will be located and contextualized. All in all, the aim will be to open a vista to the complex and colorful representational world of early modern Ottomans.

This article offers a fresh critique of the work of political scientists and historians who have propagated the Eurocentric history of democracy. The paper argues that such work can be dissected and critiqued along several key lines: their reliance on a distinctly patriarchal discourse riddled with prejudices; the assertion that one can understand the history of democracy via the etymology of the word itself; and the deeply Eurocentric
roots of the study of democracy’s past embedded in the canon of Western political thought. The paper concludes by calling on contemporary political scientists and political historians concerned with the history of  democracy to be careful in re-iterating this deeply flawed history of democracy and to instead work towards a history of democracy that retrieves the silenced histories and the forgotten democratic moments that lay behind the roar of Western power.

This most recent edition of the bibliography contains almost 21,200 titles in English (64%) and French (36%), with an introductory section on historiography. It deals with every aspect of Italian history and culture from the Late Renaissance to the French Revolution.

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Dualism, dialectics and the problem of value
Nature, geopower and capitalogenic appropriation
Unpaid work/energy and the accumulation of capital
Historical natures: value, world-praxis and abstract social nature
Value as project and process
Abstract social nature and the rise of capitalism
From Anthropocene to Capitalocene
Capital, nature and work/energy in the twenty-first century
References
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Abstract

This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.

This dissertation is an overview of the life and the career of Ottoman grand vizier Rüstem Pasha and contextualization of his grand vizierate with respect to foreign policy, bureaucratization and economic policies. This dissertation shows that beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was transformed from an expansive Muslim empire into a bureaucratic state and that Rüstem Pasha was the architect when he was acting its primary promoter and designer. The dissertation analyzes the religious and political reforms of Ottoman grand vizier Rüstem Pasha (1544-1561), which led the way for restructuring the empire and transforming it into an early modern bureaucratic state. It explores the stages of his life as a Christian boy who converted to Islam and was educated in the Ottoman palace and, after serving in several provincial governorships, attained the position of the grand vizierate. It also shows how his career was structured and enhanced through Ottoman educational institutions, as well as how he envisioned and enacted an institutionalized government system by creating new methods of record keeping in decision-making, and developing a record tracking system, as well as by standardizing career paths for officers. Having witnessed the inconclusive and draining wars with both the Safavid and the Habsburg empires, Rüstem Pasha abandoned the traditional universalist claims and engagement in gaza (holy raiding) activity, which had been the most conspicuous feature of Ottoman ideology since its inception in the fourteenth century, and instead adopted more peaceful relations with the empire’s neighbors. The dissertation also shows how he contributed to the spread of an orthodox Sunni Islam as faith and practice within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire and how he influenced the territorialization of Shiite Islam promoted by the Safavids in neighboring Iran. Signing peace agreements with the Safavids (1555) and the Habsburgs (1547) also enabled him to focus on the efficient use of internal resources by initiating new fiscal institutions to channel the economic resources into the central treasury.

This book deals with a fascinating episode in the history of philosophy, one from which those who are interested in the nature of modernity and its global origins have a great deal to learn. I believe that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a remarkable project began to take shape in the Sanskritic philosophical world. Early modernity in India consists in the formation of a new philosophical self, one which makes it possible meaningfully to conceive of oneself as engaging the ancient and the alien in conversation. The ancient texts are now not thought of as authorities to which one must defer, but regarded as the source of insight in the company of which one pursues the quest for truth. This new attitude implies a change in the conception of one’s duties towards the past. Having reconstructed the historical intellectual context in detail, and after developing a suitable methodological framework, I review work on the concept of inquiry, the nature of evidence, the self, the nature of the categories, mathematics, realism, and a new language for philosophy. A study of early modern philosophy in India has much to teach us today—about the nature of modernity as such, about the reform of educational institutions and its relationship to creative research, and about cosmopolitan identities in circumstances of globalisation. Readers may also want to consult my essay "Philosophical Modernities: Polycentricity and Early Modernity in India" (Philosophy, 2014).

"Jonardon Ganeri's book is a treasure trove of new insights and fascinating figures that leaves this reader craving much more. He weaves a rich tapestry where ideas come to life, reinvigorating our understanding of Indian philosophy and the important lessons it can teach us today. The book is refreshing and exciting . . . Anyone interested in learning about early modern Indian philosophy will have the best work I know of on the subject in their hands. And those interested more in the philosophical issues than in comparing traditions will also profit greatly. . . a fascinating view of Indian philosophy and how its insights have genuine relevance for contemporary debates. I could not recommend it more highly"
—Thom Brooks, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012

 “Jonardon Ganeri’s The Lost Age of Reason … is a book that Indologists and students of Indian philosophy cannot afford to ignore” —Andrew Nicholson, Journal of the American Oriental Society 2013.

“[The Lost Age of Reason] is packed with attention to unjustly neglected philosophers, fluent translation of difficult texts, excellent exegesis and a challenging historical argument. This is a volume that deserves to be taken seriously by a broad readership in philosophy […] This volume is highly recommended to Western and to Indian philosophers.”
—Jay L. Garfield, The Philosophical Quarterly 2013.

This dissertation received the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2016.

It examines the Ottoman transition to a new mode of kingship in the first decades of the sixteenth century by examining the life and work of Idrīs Bidlīsī (861-926/1457-1520), one of the most dynamic scholars and statesmen of the period. It situates Bidlīsī’s life within the context of the sweeping geo-political changes that precipitated the dissolution of the most powerful polities in Islamic lands and the emergence of the Ottomans as preeminent.

In his lifetime, Bidlīsī resided or worked at three of the four major sultanates of the region: the Aqquyunlu of western and central Iran, the Ottomans of the Balkans and Anatolia, and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. While his itinerant career was somewhat emblematic of this period, his extensive professional and literary activities within these three courts offer a unique view to a political culture in crisis and the efforts of one of these powers, namely the Ottomans, to transcend the basic volatile power dynamics common to all late medieval Islamic polities. Through the composition of two major chronicles of the Ottoman dynasty in Persian, Hasht bihisht (The Eight Paradises) and the Salīmshāhnāma (The Book of Sultan Selīm), Bidlīsī recorded his observations of the seminal events of his day and argued for a vision of rule undergirded by innovative discourses that emphasized the cosmic and sacral aspects of kingship.

By focusing on the life, historiographical outlook, and political thought of Bidlīsī, the dissertation elucidates the delicate and often volatile political and patronage dynamic that existed between rulers and their retainers in late medieval Islamic lands and represented the primary challenge to forming centralized administrations. It describes the role of court patronage in the production of historical works and the significance of those works to ideological discourses of rule. Lastly, it traces the spread of a novel vocabulary of sovereignty from its fifteenth-century origins to its emergence as the ideological basis for empire across large parts of Asia in the sixteenth century.

If remembering, feeling, decision-making and other 'psychological' processes are by nature animated or embodied processes, then the geography of embodiment also includes a geography of mind. And if, further, such cognitive and affective processes are distributed and ecological processes, in that they sometimes spread across brain, body, and world, then human minds are partly geographical or environmental in nature. On this view, historically and culturally unique landscapes, architectures, technologies, and ecologies are not always simply external to our mental life, not merely settings and stimuli for thought on the one hand, and (on the other) one of many kinds of thing to think about. Instead, in certain circumstances the places we inhabit can partly constitute the processes and activities of feeling, remembering, and so on.

Despite the new mobilities of early modern English society, significant practices of personal and shared remembering continued to be anchored in experienced place. Even as technologies and strategies for dealing with past and future altered, memory was still richly scaffolded by landscapes, artifacts, architecture, and institutions which all themselves bore the traces of individual and cultural intervention. This essay builds on recent social histories of early modern landscape and memory, to explore the nature of embodied place memory. It also aims at an updated assessment of the historical utility of the idea of distributed cognitive ecologies.

El presente diccionario pretende exponer, de forma sistemática, la actividad y vínculos de la élite antioqueña y viejocaldense de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y primera del XX. Esta obra nació a
principios de 2010, a partir del interés por sistematizar la información existente sobre la élite antioqueña de la segunda parte del siglo XIX, con el fin de nutrir análisis económicos basados en metodologías con altas exigencias de datos. Dicha labor se fue ampliando de forma espontánea e inevitable, y luego de muchos meses de trabajo permanente, se tiene como resultado, el hasta el momento, más completo y cuidadoso compendio de información sobre la élite del periodo en la región.

This thesis examines the Solomonic grimoire manuscripts between 1400-1800. Grimoires, as books of magic materials, claim an ancient lineage from the time of King Solomon of Israel.  Modern scholarship has attempted to argue either for or against such a claim, but has not adequately addressed the meanings of imagery and alphabetic symbols contained within each grimoire as an indicator of origin. Through comparisons of several manuscript collections, the basic geometric shapes of circles and squares, that repeatedly form the templates for several objects to be constructed by the magus, are here examined, their various scripts deciphered, and their purpose contextualized for the early modern magician and conjuror. This thesis suggests that the genre of the Solomonic grimoires, in manuscript or printed form, possibly originated only from the 16th-century works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, a conclusion based on use of the Malachim alphabet. Furthermore, the thesis questions grimoire use beyond library transcriptions, the existence of any practice related to them, and the possible origins of the scientific experiment.

Esta pesquisa procura investigar dois processos: a formação e consolidação de uma elite local e a relação do poder local com a monarquia e sua administração periférica, na tentativa de destacar a profunda conexão entre esses dois desenvolvimentos. A área escolhida para estudo é a Bahia no século XVII, em razão de sua crescente importância dentro do mundo português ao longo do século, mas sempre em perspectiva comparativa, colocando-a dentro de um quadro atlântico mais amplo. Para isso analisou-se o desenvolvimento econômico da capitania, as especificidades de sua sociedade escravista, as características individuais e familiares dos membros da elite, suas formas de auto-identificação, sua relação com os governadores-gerais e a Coroa. As fontes utilizadas foram diversificadas, embora majoritariamente de natureza administrativa, e organizadas em diferentes bancos de dados. Procurou-se destacar o contínuo processo de “fazer-se” da elite nessas diversas dimensões, assim como a forte interdependência entre Coroa e elites.

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

Imperial grimoires—that is, manuals on various forms of magic and divination written for or commissioned by royal readers—proliferated across the early modern Persianate world, more than paralleling the grimoire boom in Renaissance Europe. In extreme contrast to their contemporary Latin or English cognates, however, far less imperial in tenor, these Persian occult-scientific manuals have been left almost wholly unstudied. This programmatic article diagnoses the colonialist-orientalist causes for this wild imbalance in comparative early modern Western intellectual and imperial historiography and outlines a philological way forward. Far from being evidence for “the superstition of the Moslem natives,” such manuals are an indispensable aperture onto precisely those processes—common to Islamdom and Christendom alike—by which we define Western early modernity: textualization, canonization, standardization, confessionalization, centralization, imperialization, bureaucratization, democratization and mathematization. Yet they also record the religiocultural and institutional divergences that so distinguish the Islamicate and especially Persianate experience of early modernity from the Latin Christianate. Historians of books, of science and of empire must therefore finally overcome the eurocentrism and occultophobia still endemic in these fields, and cease judging Islamicate imperial occultism by Christianate standards, or simply writing it out of history altogether.

Il volume verte sulle Case sante dell’Annunziata nel Regno di Napoli, istituzioni ospedaliere, assistenziali ed educative di origine angioina. Il contributo si compone di tre parti: nella prima, sono ricostruite le vicende storico-istituzionali delle Annunziate e i loro rapporti con le città del regno; la seconda parte è dedicata agli archivi ospedalieri, in particolare a quello dell’Annunziata di Napoli; l’edizione di dieci documenti regi di età medievale occupa la terza parte del volume.

Completata l’inventariazione generale dell’Archivio Orsini, con questo volume si vuole offrire al pubblico degli studiosi ulteriori strumenti per orientarsi nelle complesse ramificazioni della famiglia e della documentazione. Viene approfondita la ricostruzione storico-genealogica dei principali rami familiari la cui memoria cartacea è arrivata fino a noi (Bracciano, San Gemini, Gravina); si illustrano le vicende di altri rami e di altre famiglie la cui documentazione, nel tempo, per i motivi più disparati, si è aggregata a quella degli Orsini di Bracciano; viene ripercorsa, inoltre, la formazione e l’evoluzione dell’archivio dal XVI secolo e, infine, viene illustrata la sua struttura in tutte le sue parti. Il volume è corredato da una appendice con tavole genealogiche e da tabelle che riconducono i documenti più antichi della serie delle pergamene ai rispettivi rami produttori.

The aim of this study is to collect evidence for textile recycling from a prehistoric and historic perspective. The basis are original textile finds and not, as might be expected, written or pictorial sources. The material presented here focuses on archaeological finds, especially on prehistoric to early medieval evidence from Central Europe, also mentioning some interesting examples from medieval and Early Modern times.
This is not a comprehensive study of all possible secondary uses of textiles, but it shall demonstrate different interesting case studies such as re-use and recycling of garments with examples from Bronze Age till early modern period. We also learn from Early Medieval evidence that textile rags have been employed for production processes e.g. of ceramic vessels, clay figurines or for thin bronze objects. In the salt-mines Hallstatt and Dürrnberg in Austria, hundreds of textile scraps have been found, left back in the mines after secondary use as make-shift binding material or sanitary items.
Worn-out textiles were used for caulking wooden ships, as sealing for water-management in prehistoric copper mines and as insulation material for medieval castles. At least, textile scraps also ended in medieval and early modern latrinae – after they have been used as “toilet-paper”. The evidence collected demonstrates a careful resource-management.

Brian Vickers once described John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica as “possibly the most obscure work ever written by an Englishman,” asking whether there were even ten references to it in the seventeenth century. This article considers Dee’s reputation as an alchemist, in particular the reception of his Monas Hieroglyphica, in Latin, French, and German texts published in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and examines two themes: first, discussion of the Monas Hieroglyphica in the context of cabbalistic calculations and Pythagorean symbolic numbers; and second, references to, and appropriations of, the hieroglyphic monad in the context of chemical notation. It shows how Dee’s work was read by alchemists influenced by Trithemius’s exposition of the Emerald Tablet, including major promulgators of Paracelsian thought such as Gerard Dorn, Oswald Croll, Joseph Duchesne, and Heinrich Khunrath. The article also notes how the Monas Hieroglyphica appealed to purveyors of both physical and more theosophical forms of alchemy, such as the Rosicrucian Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz. It concludes with a discussion of the somewhat surprising approval of Dee’s enigmatic work from one who was utterly antagonistic to Paracelsian and Rosicrucian philosophy, the chemist Andreas Libavius, who openly admitted to using the hieroglyphic monad as the basis for the ground plan for his ideal laboratory.

This paper investigates the eighteenth century phenomenon of the wide spread and use of Sabbaetean literature by “main stream” Jewish rabbis. For what reason did  participants in the Jewish rabbinic elite posses and use copies of heretical manuscripts, while integrating them in their literally projects as well as their personal daily practice ? Moreover, how did the tempestuous controversy over Jacob Frank and his believers at the middle of the eighteen century affect this status of Sabbatean texts in the rabbinic library?
In this essay I will examine a particular aspect of this literary opacity from the viewpoint of two Torah scholars. By dating and revisiting lost manuscripts and short fragments, along with well-known polemics, this paper will attempt to uncover the basic attitudes of R. Ezekiel Landau of Prague and R. Pin@has Katzenellenbogen of Boskowitz toward  Kabbalistic and Sabbatean literature. Several personal writings dating from 1752 to 1761 will be closely examined with the aim of tracing two opposing, yet prototypical responses to the place occupied by Sabbatean literature on the Kabbalistic-Lurianic shelf of the contemporary rabbinic library.

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