World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination

Front Matter....Pages i-ix
Introduction: “Think you there was, or ever could be” a world such as this I dreamed....Pages 1-4
Paracelsus on the “New Creation” and Demonic Magic: Misunderstandings, Oversights, and False Accusations in His Early Reception....Pages 5-33
Building Blocks: Imagination, Knowledge, and Passion in Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De Oculta Philosophia Libri Tres ....Pages 35-58
The Astrological Cosmos of Johannes Kepler....Pages 59-66
A Theater of the Unseen: Athanasius Kircher’s Museum in Rome ....Pages 67-90
Fantasy Islands: Utopia, The Tempest, and New Atlantis as Places of Controlled Credulousness....Pages 91-117
Imagination and Pleasure in the Cosmography of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth ....Pages 119-139
The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (1555–1634) and the Death of Prester John....Pages 141-171
Red Sea Travelers in Mediterranean Lands: Ethiopian Scholars and Early Modern Orientalism, ca. 1500–1668....Pages 173-200
“In manners they be rude, and monst’rous eke in fashion”: Images of Otherness in Early Modern Drama....Pages 201-231
Icons of Atrocity: John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581)....Pages 233-254
Back Matter....Pages 255-270