A period in European history marked by efforts to reform the Christian Church
Why Spain had no Renaissance in the Italian sense, the Church as sole patron, Italian influence on Spanish art, the Plateresque style, the sculptors Torrigiano, Forment and Berruguete, the painter Morales, the crafts, and a closing reflection on the art of the age of religious upheaval.
Why the miraculous year 1543 produced Copernicus and Vesalius, the conditions that helped and hindered science, the attitude of popes and Reformers, the hold of alchemy, magic and astrology, Nostradamus, and the fear of witchcraft in the sixteenth century.
The historical Georg Faust and the birth of his legend, the career of Cornelius Agrippa from occult philosophy to a sweeping skepticism about every science, his criticism of the Church, and his unhappy end.
Advances in mathematics and instruments, the prediction of a second flood, the life and training of Copernicus, ancient forerunners of a sun-centered universe, his short Commentary, the reactions of Luther and Calvin, and the arrival of Rheticus.
The publication of Copernicus's great book through Rheticus and Osiander, Osiander's unsigned preface, Copernicus's death, his dedication to Pope Paul III, and the arguments and planetary order set out in the book.
Why Copernicus's contemporaries hesitated, who accepted the new astronomy, the Church's attitude through the centuries, the blow to theology and to humanity's sense of place, then Agricola's geology and mineralogy and the geography of Leo Africanus.
The Spanish conquests and the explorers of the New World, Magellan's voyage and the first circumnavigation, the advance of geography and cartography, and the commercial, intellectual and religious consequences of the discoveries.
How botany separated from pharmacy through Brunfels, the Cordus family and Fuchs, Conrad Gesner's encyclopedic natural history and bibliography, Vives's founding of empirical psychology, and the early training of Andreas Vesalius.
Vesalius's years at Louvain and Padua, his great 1543 book on the structure of the human body, the quarrel with the old guard, his court career in Spain, the trepanning of Don Carlos, his death in 1564, and the other discoverers of the circulation of the blood.
Medicine still bound to Galen and Avicenna, new drugs from overseas, filth and epidemics, the practice of barber-surgeons, Ambroise Pare's humane treatment of wounds, and the opening of the chapter on Paracelsus.
Paracelsus after the Peasants' War, his mixture of superstition and chemical insight, his new drugs and theory of disease, the cures at Basel, his appointment, his manifesto against the old authorities, and the bonfire of St. John's Eve.
Paracelsus's boasts and his flight from Basel, his years in Nuremberg, St. Gallen and Salzburg, his clinical treatise on syphilis and its mercury cure, his late religious turn, his death in 1541, and a judgment on his genius.
