World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination [Hardcover]

The early modern period was rife with attempts to re-imagine the world and the human place within it. This volume looks at natural philosophers, playwrights, historians, and other figures in the period 1500-1700 as a means of accessing the plethora of world models that circulated in Europe during this era.Introduction: 'Think you there was, or ever could be' a World such as this I Dreamed; A.B.Kavey Paracelsus on the 'New Creation' and Demonic Magic: Misunderstandings, Oversights, and False Accusations in His Early Reception; D.T.Daniel Building Blocks: Imagination, Knowledge, and Passion in Agrippa von Nettesheim's De Oculta Philosophia Libri Tres ;? A.B.Kavey? The Astrological Cosmos of Johannes Kepler; S.J.Rabin A Theater of the Unseen: Athanasius Kircher's Museum in Rome; M.A.Waddell Fantasy Islands: Utopia, The Tempest and New Atlantis as Places of Controlled Credulousness; G.Giglioni Imagination and Pleasure in the Cosmography of Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth ; A.Coppola The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (1555-1634) and the Death of Prester John; M.Salvadore Red Sea Travelers in Mediterranean Lands: Ethiopian Scholars and Early Modern Orientalism, ca. 1500-1668; J.De Lorenzi ''In manners they be rude, and monst'rous eke in fashion': Images of Otherness in Early Modern Drama'; P.Tuite Icons of Atrocity: John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581); V.Carey

The imagination as something other than a source of literary invention is drawing increasing attention in recent years, and this anthology is a noteworthy addition. With essays ranging in topic from the occult to the protoscientific to various forms of colonial propaganda, this book is well-conceived and tightly constructed, with a clear trajectory that runs from actual or literal cosmology through imagined utopias and into idealized colonialist projects. The focus on the imagination and the variety of disciplines covered make World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination as timely and usefull³*