Resources for History

John Dee

Spiritually Significant Documents

Hiram Haydn

• The Counter-Renaissance (Scribner's, 1950)

  from pp. xiii-xiv:

  What unites these otherwise dissimilar thinkers of the sixteenth century is that they share completely an anti-intellectualistic, anti-moralistic, anti-synthetic, anti-authoritarian bias. The central premise of the great synthesis which Thomas Aquinas bequeathed to the later Christian humanists is summarized in Cicero's statement that "True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and eternal." This was the cement which had held together a comprehensive and interlocking world order; and it is only when we understand that Luther and Calvin in theology, Machiavelli in political theory, Montaigne in his ethical and psychological studies, and the new empirical scientists in physics and astronomy and anatomy and medicine were all attacking this one central principle - it is only then that we can see clearly that what I have called the Counter-Renaissance is on great ideological revolution, and not the arbitrary uniting of isolated figures.

  from p. 101:

  Without prolonged study, it is difficult to distinguish with exactness in these sixteenth-century works an indebtedness to the skepticism of the New Academy fromon to that of the Pyrrhonic school. But by the end of the century, they have all been cited and imitated. In the anti-intellectual cause, Carneades, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus are conscripts along with Solomon, Paul and the patristic writers.

Stephen A. McKnight

• Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity (Louisiana State, 1989)
• Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought (Missouri, 1992)

  A collection of essays edited by McKnight:

  • Allen G. Debus, "Science and History: The Birth of a New Field"
  • Allen G. Debus, "The Scientific Revolution: A Chemist's Reappraisal"
  • Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, "Alchemical Death and Resurrection: The Significance of Alchemy in the Age of Newton"
  • Stephen A. McKnight, "Science, the Prisca Theologia, and Modern Epochal Consciousness"
  • Klaus Vondung, "Millenarianism, Hermeticism, and the Search for a Universal Science"
  • David Walsh, "A Mythology of Reason: The Persistence of Pseudo-Science in the Modern World"
  • Wilbur Applebaum, "Epistemological and Political Implications of the Scientific Revolution"

Ramon G. Mendoza

• The Acentric Labyrinth: Giordano Bruno's Prelude to Contemporary Cosmology (Element, 1995)

Stephen Toulmin

• Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited

• John Matthews, "The Grail and the Rose"
• Christopher Bamford, "The Meaning of the Rose Cross"
• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, "The Rosicrucian Prelude: John Dee's Mission in Central Europe"
• Joscelyn Godwin, "The Deepest of the Rosicrucians: Michael Maier"
• Robert Powell, "Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Rudolf II and the Prague Hermetic Renaissance"
• Rafal T. Prinke, "The Twelfth Adept: Michael Sendivogius in Rudolfine Prague"
• Clare Goodrick-Clarke, "The Rosicrucian Afterglow: The Life and Influence of Comenius"
• Paul Bembridge, "The Rosicrucian Resurgence at the Court of Cromwell"
• Christopher McIntosh, "The Rosicrucian Legacy"

Frances A. Yates

• The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

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