http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/universalreformation/?page_id=321
Abstracts over: Universele Reformatie: intellectuele netwerken in Centraal en West Europa, 1560-1670; conferentie St Anne sept 2010 Oxford
Hierin o.a. een abstract over de verhouding tussen de Silezische Abraham von Franckenberg en Engelse medicus Robert Fludd
Urszula Szulakowska (University of Leeds)
The Paracelsian Medicine and Theosophy of Abraham von Franckenberg and Robert Fludd
The focus of the argument will concern the conceptual inter-relation of the Silesian nobleman Abraham von Franckenberg (1593-1652), a member of a powerful and wealthy family and the English medical practitioner Robert Fludd (1574-1637). Franckenberg was the chief disciple of Jacob Boehme although he was an original thinker in his own right who extended Paracelsian theosophy and medicine into the context of Lutheran apocalyptic expectations, devising an imaginative cryptographic symbology intended to conceal the implications of his thought. As was customary in esoteric circles of the period, Franckenberg favoured the reconcilliation of religious difference and an end to warfare. Paracelsian alchemists such as Fludd and Franckenberg were the spiritual descendants of the radical Protestant Spirituals of the 1540s-1560s. Fludd and Franckenberg took recourse to the Communion liturgy of the established Protestant Church, replicating it in their laboratories in the attempt to produce a substance that would be the physical equivalent of Christ’s own Spirit and whose properties would heal all diseases of both body and soul. The argument of the present paper will consider the similarities between the Christologicalalchemy and Paracelsianism of Fludd and Franckenberg and also consider these themes as found in the work of other alchemists in southern Germany and Austria such as Stefan Michelspacher. Whereas it is problematic to establish evidence of direct contemporary contacts between these figures, there is a common inheritance from the published writings of alchemists such as Heinrich Khunrath in an earlier generation.