English medicine in the seventeenth century

The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth Century English Natural History.

Before Newton's seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemliah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object's hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed col...

Interrelationships between Language and Literature from Old English to the Modern Period

Literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. It is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ This paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 AD to the present day.  The grammar of present-day English is closely related to that of Old English with the same tense formation and word orders. The verse unit is a single line and its org...

Animal Souls, Metempsychosis, and Theodicy in Seventeenth- Century English Thought

The Creation of the English Hippocrates

This article examines the process by which the London physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) rose to fame as the English Hippocrates in the late seventeenth century. It provides a survey of the evidence for the establishment of Sydenham's reputation from his own writings, his professional relations, and the writings of his supporters and detractors. These sources reveal that in the first decades o...

The Role of Language in Accusations of Witchcraft in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain

Linguistic factors played a significant role in the origin and spread of accusations of witchcraft in Early Modern Spain. The preoccupation with witches’ words is at its root a preoccupation about the power of speech and, to a great extent, of female speech. Studies in some Early European countries have connected aggressive female speech styles with accusations of witchcraft, and this article o...

Pirates, Highwaymen, and the Origins of the Criminal in Seventeenth-Century English Thought