In the early modern era the notion of imagination was made responsible for phenomena which were later explained in terms of embryology, genetics, psychology, bacteriology or other scientific disciplines. Images, often seated in the upper abdomen (hypochondriac region) or the womb (hysteria), were regarded as powerful influences on material reality. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteent...

This article examines the emergence of a new epistemic value that was attributed to remnants past during broad debate on historical evidence in late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: unintentionality testimony. Beginning early modern period, growing awareness partiality literacy narratives regarded as intentional testimonies well interest nonwritten pasts have led consideration other kinds ...

Few historians of the magnetic compass carry their story beyond the period of the birth of ocean avigation. To those interested in this fascinating instrument here are, however, many interesting lines of enquiry to be traced in the centuries which followed. These notes are the result of an attempt to investigate the beginnings of just one branch of progress. During the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, a...

Painting a picture of the lives of the early modern mad outside institutions has not yet been done in the Netherlands. However, by looking at notarial documents and admission requests, we can learn more about how the mad were cared for outside the institutions, and the impact their behaviour had on the people close to them. Investigating these sources for both Amsterdam and Utrecht in the seven...

IN APRIL 1699, an unusual disturbance broke out in the streets of Cairo. As part of the annual pilgrimage caravan, which escorted Muslim pilgrims through the Sinai Desert to the holy cities of Arabia, a solemn procession was conveying a new silk covering destined for the Ka ba, or Sacred Shrine, in Mecca. Among the most notable participants were a group of North Africans, who created an uproar ...

Two central characteristics of Catholicism in Southwest Germany were clericalism and communalism. Clericalism meant, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that German Catholics demanded that priests, especially resident priests, perform and sanctify church rituals. Communalism meant that village communes played a central role in the supervision of the rural clergy and in the o...

The fact that British men of letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commented on the subject of animal experimentation is well known. Apart from anti-vivisectionists and modern advocates of animal rights, who have been keen to cite the most critical of these responses, ' scholars have considered them in three main areas of research. In the history of ideas some of those literary so...