1st Edition
An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644)
Contents: Preface; Part I Van Helmont in Context: The medical alchemical background of Van Helmont’s Christian philosophy; Van Helmont’s life; Van Helmont’s Ortus Medicinae and some of its problems. Part II The Principles of Van Helmont’s ‘Christian Philosophy’: God; Nature; Man; Applied philosophy: alchemy and medicine; General conclusions; Appendix: list of chapter-treatises in Ortus Medicinae; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Georgiana D. Hedesan is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical History and Humanities at University of Oxford, working on a research project on the quest for universal medicine and radical prolongation of life in seventeenth-century alchemy (2013-2016). Prior to this, she held a short-term Cantemir Junior Fellowship at University of Oxford and a Frances A. Yates fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. A PhD in History from University of Exeter (2012), she is the author of several articles and reviews in scholarly journals dealing with Paracelsus, Van Helmont and alchemy, including articles published in Medical History and Ambix, as well as chapters in books either published or to be published by University of Chicago Press, Ashgate and Routledge.
"Hedesan’s account is clear and accurate, substantiated by a wealth of information that is always duly contextualized and historicized."
- Guido Giglioni, Warburg Institute, University of London.
"An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge is a very useful reference work on the Helmontian corpus and makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of the early modern period. It will be of interest to historians of alchemy, medicine, and Christian thought, as well as readers with an interest in cultures of knowledge and intellectual reform more generally."
-Tillmann Taape
