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Egyptian Oedipus : Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity, Paperback / softback Book

Egyptian Oedipus : Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

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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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Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
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