Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2-80), was one of Europe's most
inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. But Kircher is
most famous - or infamous - for his quixotic attempt to decipher
the Egyptian hieroglyphs and reconstruct the ancient traditions
they encoded. Here Daniel Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation
of Kircher's hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of
seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages.
The spectacular flaws of his scholarship have fostered an image of
Kircher as an eccentric anachronism, a throwback to the Renaissance
hermetic tradition. Stolzenberg argues against this view, showing
how Kircher embodied essential tensions of a pivotal phase in
European intellectual history, when pre-Enlightenment scholars
pioneered modern empirical methods of studying the past while still
working within traditional frameworks, such as biblical history and
beliefs about magic and esoteric wisdom.
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