Peter Harrison explains the disappearance of symbolic meanings of animals from seventeenth-century works in natural history through what he calls the “literalist mentality of the reformers.” By contrast, the present article argues in favor of a different understanding of the connection between hermeneutics and Protestant natural history. Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Johannes Brenz, Johannes Oecolampadius, and Jean Calvin continued to assign moral meanings to natural particulars, and moral interpretations can still be found in the writings of Protestant naturalists such as Conrad Gesner, Caspar Heldelinus, Jeremias Wilde, Thomas Penny, and Thomas Moffett. If there are differences between Protestant and Catholic interpretations of animals, then these differences derive from the reformer’s greater insistence on providing textual support for assigning symbolic meanings, their resulting greater reluctance in assigning prophetic meanings to animals, and their elimination of spiritual interpretations of animals that are in tension with central tenets of Protestant theology. These differences in hermeneutics and theology may explain some of the divergences between the symbolic interpretations of animals proposed by Protestant natural historians and their Catholic colleague, Ulisse Aldrovandi.

Although in the sixteenth century some pharmacological powers were widely ascribed to celestial influences, alternative views of the nature of such powers began to be developed: Reductionism, according to which all pharmacological powers could be understood as combinations of the powers of elementary qualities, and emergentism, according to which some pharmacological powers are irreducible to combinations of the powers of elementary but arise out of their combination and interaction. The former view can be traced in the work of Francisco Valles (1524–1592) and Thomas Erastus (1524–1583), the latter view in the work of Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606) and Jacob Schegk (1511–1587).

Almost half a century before Henry More, the Padua-based natural philosopher Fortunio Liceti (1577–1657) formulated a distinction between material extension and immaterial extension. While More's version of the distinction is seen as one of the most characteristic features of his metaphysics—underlying both his theory of individual spirits and of absolute divine space—Liceti's metaphysics of immaterial extension has not received much attention by commentators. Liceti ascribes immaterial extension to light and the human mind and, like More, he uses the analogy between light and mind to explicate the structural differences between material and immaterial extension. In this article, I explore how Liceti—following some aspects of Albert the Great's eclectic Aristotelianism—tries to combine broadly Aristotelian accounts of light and mind with the Platonic concept of emanative causation. I argue that, in Liceti, the notion of existential independence from matter lies at the heart of his conception of extended, but actually indivisible, immaterial beings: Such beings cannot be divided through the division of matter because their existence, due to the role of emanative causation, does not depend on the potencies of matter.

This article explores some connections between the medical conception of poison-induced epilepsy and the ontological conception of a plurality of substantial forms in living beings in the work of the Wittenberg physician and philosopher Daniel Sennert (1572–1637). It does so by taking a developmental approach, tracing Sennert's responses to some of his predecessors such as Jean Fernel, Petrus Severinus, and Julius Caesar Scaliger. Sennert's responses to Fernel indicate that Sennert does not regard poison-induced epilepsy as a disease that affects the dominant form of a living being. His responses to Severinus indicate that he also does not reduce the agency of epilepsy-inducing poisons to chemical causation. His responses to Scaliger indicate that he assigns to subordinate forms in the human body a central role in explaining the occurrence of auto-generated poisons leading to epileptic fits. At the same time, Sennert substantially goes beyond Scaliger by applying some of Severinus's insights concerning analogies between species degeneration and the generation of disease to the case of epilepsy.

This paper investigates the relationship between some corpuscularian and Aristotelian strands that run through the thought of the sixteenth-century philosopher and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger. Scaliger often uses the concepts of corpuscles, pores, and vacuum. At the same time, he also describes mixture as involving the fusion of particles into a continuous body. The paper explores how Scaliger's combination of corpuscularian and non-corpuscularian views is shaped, in substantial aspects, by his response to the views on corpuscles and the vacuum in the work of his contemporary, Girolamo Fracastoro. Fracastoro frequently appears in Scaliger's work as an opponent against whom numerous objections are directed. However, if one follows up Scaliger's references, it soon becomes clear that Scaliger also shares some of Fracastoro's views. Like Scaliger, Fracastoro suggests corpuscularian explanations of phenomena such as water rising in lime while at the same time ascribing some non-corpuscularian properties to his natural minima. Like Scaliger, Fracastoro maintains that there is no vacuum devoid of bodies since places cannot exist independently of bodies (although their opinions diverge regarding how exactly the relevant dependency relation might be explicated). Finally, like Scaliger, Fracastoro connects a continuum view of mixture with a theory of natural minima.