A treatise on lovesickness

current study owes much to Schmitt's scholarship. He died in April 1986. This volume collects essays by scholars of diverse backgrounds as a tribute to Schmitt's achievements. Several essays extend and develop work begun by Schmitt: Eckhard Kessler provides a useful review of how Renaissance Aristotelianism is interrelated to Renaissance humanism and Platonism; through an examination of the treatments of infinite divisibility and of the nature of motion, John Murdoch identifies the core of Renaissance (Jesuit) Aristotelianism with the (Thomist) natural philosophy of the thirteenth century; Stephen Pumfrey illustrates Schmitt's long-standing conviction of the vitality of Renaissance Aristotelians through two (Jesuit) responses to Gilbert's magnetic philosophy; in a study of the printers of Ramist philosophy textbooks, Ian Maclean draws attention to the necessity, when dealing with bibliographies of Renaissance publications, of bearing in mind the far from "neutral" motives of publishers. Others have applied what the editors have called Schmitt's "unificationist" view of Renaissance intellectual history (pp. vii f.) with interesting results: Lisa Jardine demonstrates that even from such tangential primary sources as Gabriel Harvey's marginalia we may learn how the English understood their "civilisedness" by identifying themselves with Rome and the classical culture; Vivian Nutton shows how much information there is to be extracted from two unusual prefaces by an understudied Italian medic; Nancy Siraisi disentangles various trends of Renaissance thought in the humanist critiques of medicine. Most notable is perhaps the potential of scholarship carried on into fields even beyond Schmitt's interests, in particular the theological and religious context, which, according to Luce Giard, Schmitt himself "curiously" never addressed directly (p. 268). Here Richard Popkin calls for further research into the serious religious and ideological context in which the relationship of scepticism to religion changed drastically between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; by looking into the theological implications of Paracelsus' philosophy, Charles Webster demonstrates why Conrad Gessner was dismissive of it but at the same time could pursue Paracelsian iatrochemistry; Laurence Brockliss explains the "sluggish" reception of Copernican cosmology in Catholic France through the problems posed by Jansenism; while Richard Sorabji explains the various Arabic readings of Aristotle's God and their influences. At the end of the volume there is an intellectual biography of Schmitt by Luce Giard and a useful bibliography of Schmitt's works, by which we are reminded of his extraordinary breadth and depth of scholarship. As many of the essays have done in this volume, to pursue and continue scholarship in the spirit of Schmitt, and reap new and fruitful results is a tribute worthy of his achievements. Even to a student of Renaissance philosophy who never had the privilege to meet Charles Schmitt, this collection of essays amply demonstrates the impressive breadth of his influence and his exceptional ability to bring together scholars from different fields, even after his death.