Charles Webster

The 2013 digitization of the vast Hartlib Papers archive highlighted the pressing need for a comprehensive modern study of Samuel Hartlib (1600-1662), a central figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Though educated in Eastern Europe, Hartlib spent his adult life in London, where he became a prolific correspondent and chronicler. His Ephemerides, spanning 1634 to 1660, and his extensive correspondence with leading thinkers across Britain and Protestant Europe offer an unparalleled window into the era's religious, political, and scientific ferment. This volume goes beyond previous studies in both scope and depth, drawing extensively on archival sources and offering new interpretations of Hartlib's network and influence. Organized chronologically, it explores the wide-ranging social, economic, and ideological pursuits of Hartlib and his collaborators-many of them renowned figures in their own right-and his close alignment with the Cromwellian cause. Providing the most complete portrait to date of the Hartlib circle's emergence and impact, this study sets a new benchmark for scholarship and invites renewed engagement with one of the early modern period's most visionary projects of knowledge, reform, and communication.

The 2013 digitization of the vast Hartlib Papers archive highlighted the pressing need for a comprehensive modern study of Samuel Hartlib (1600-1662), a central figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Though educated in Eastern Europe, Hartlib spent his adult life in London, where he became a prolific correspondent and chronicler. His Ephemerides, spanning 1634 to 1660, and his extensive correspondence with leading thinkers across Britain and Protestant Europe offer an unparalleled window into the era's religious, political, and scientific ferment. This volume goes beyond previous studies in both scope and depth, drawing extensively on archival sources and offering new interpretations of Hartlib's network and influence. Organized chronologically, it explores the wide-ranging social, economic, and ideological pursuits of Hartlib and his collaborators-many of them renowned figures in their own right-and his close alignment with the Cromwellian cause. Providing the most complete portrait to date of the Hartlib circle's emergence and impact, this study sets a new benchmark for scholarship and invites renewed engagement with one of the early modern period's most visionary projects of knowledge, reform, and communication.

In recent years the study of nursing history in Britain has been transformed by the application of concepts and methods from the social sciences to original sources. The myths and legends which have grown up through a century of anecdotal writing have been chipped away to reveal the complex story of an occupation shaped and reshaped by social and technological change. Most of the work has been scattered in monographs, journals and edited collections. The skills of a social historian, a sociologist and a graduate nurse have been brought together to rethink the history of modern nursing in the light of the latest scholarship. The account starts by looking at the type of nursing care available in 1800. This was usually provided by the sick person's family or household servants. It traces the interdependent growth of general nursing and the modern hospital and examines the separate origins and eventual integration of mental nursing, district nursing, health visiting and midwifery. It concludes with reflections on the prospects for nursing in the year 2000.

Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), better known as Paracelsus, was a physician, natural magician, radical activist of the early Reformation, and commentator on the social and religious issues of his day. This elegantly written book is the defining account of the man known as “Paracelsus the Great.” Drawing on the whole range of relevant manuscript and printed sources, Charles Webster considers Paracelsus’s life and works, explores his advocacy for total reform of the clerical, legal, and medical professions, and describes his precise expectations for the Christian church of the future, focusing on his affinity with the spiritualist Anabaptists. The author concludes with the apocalyptic speculations of Paracelsus, who vividly portrayed the sense of endtime crisis that constituted one of the defining characteristics of his era.

This third collection of Charles Schmitt’s articles complements the previous two and consists largely of studies published in the last few years of his life. It therefore contains his mature reflections on central issues in the fields of Renaissance philosophy and science, as well as important new research findings. The main subjects are Aristotelianism and Scepticism, and the history of medicine and natural philosophy. Some articles assess the place of traditional elements in the work of major scientific innovators, such as Galileo or Harvey, others make available new sources of documentation and show the significance of writings others had not deigned to look at. Charles Schmitt’s insistence that Renaissance thought should be reconstructed in terms faithful to the value systems of the period also led to an increasing interest in the socio-economic context of philosophical speculation, reflected here in the studies on the University of Pisa in the 16th century.

In recent years the study of nursing history in Britain has been transformed by the application of concepts and methods from the social sciences to original sources. The myths and legends which have grown up through a century of anecdotal writing have been chipped away to reveal the complex story of an occupation shaped and reshaped by social and technological change. Most of the work has been scattered in monographs, journals and edited collections. The skills of a social historian, a sociologist and a graduate nurse have been brought together to rethink the history of modern nursing in the light of the latest scholarship. The account starts by looking at the type of nursing care available in 1800. This was usually provided by the sick person's family or household servants. It traces the interdependent growth of general nursing and the modern hospital and examines the separate origins and eventual integration of mental nursing, district nursing, health visiting and midwifery. It concludes with reflections on the prospects for nursing in the year 2000.