With great interest, I read Kompanje’s (2006) clinical case report about a remarkable penis-shortening device invented in 1593 by the surgeon Hildanus. With this letter, I want to point your readers to an even older description of a similar device—not by a medical scholar, but by the great Persian humanist, philosopher, and poet Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273). In his poem, ‘‘The Importa...

MUST BEGIN with expressing my cordial thanks for your kind invitation. It is a great pleasure to me and I regard it as a great privilege to be asked to participate in this celebration-1 t of the four-hundredth anniversary of Vesalius' De hIumani corporis fabrica. But I have to confess that I felt serious scruples about my competence for the task you have assigned to me. Is a philosopher entitle...

Renaissance readers were familiar with two traditions of visualizing the continent Europe as a woman: myth Europa and bull, personifications queen. This article examines impact these on geographical, political cultural discourses through example French poet Ronsard's Discours de l'alteration et change des choses humaines. It argues that reference in to Ottoman Empire assailing would evoke for f...

When we think of Christianity's role in the rise of science, what do we think of? How it hindered it, such as the conflict between Galileo (1564-1642) and the Inquisition in the seventeenth century? Or, perhaps, do we think of Thomas Huxley debating evolution with Bishop Wilberforce in the nineteenth century? What we need to do now is take a deep breath, and take a step out of today's overwhelm...

Fracastoro was, like Leonardo, a universal man, and, perhaps for that very reason, has lacked an adequate biography. Rossi is jejune and outdated, and the harvest of Fracastoro's manuscripts is only just beginning. Hence, the old biography of W. P. Greswell, 1801, ed. 2, 1805, still has its uses, for it concentrates almost entirely on Fracastoro as a poet and philosopher and uses many primary t...

despite the great fame the well-known abbasid poet –abu nuwas- enjoys, his real character is covered in a misty cloud. one of the vague aspects of his character is his religious and political tendency in a way that his poems carry the features of both atheism and belief in god and the judgment day. from a political perspective, he is an advocate of abbasid government, and at the same time a shi...

This book is a history of the culture of the Italian Renaissance in a period (roughly 1400–1550) in which contemporaries claimed that art and literature was ‘reborn’. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Renaissance movement was a systematic attempt to go forward by going back – in other words, to break with medieval tradition by following an older model, that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Hundr...