Mundus subterraneus athanasius kircher biography
•
Athanasius Kircher
German Jesuit scholar and polymath ()
Athanasius KircherSJ (2 May &#;– 27 November )[1] was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40&#;major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger namn Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his vast range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts".[2] He taught for more than 40&#;years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades.
Kircher claimed to have deciphered the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptian language, but most of his assumptions and translations in the field turned out to be wrong. He did, however, correctly establish the link between the ancient Egyptian and the Coptic languages, and some commentators[who?] regard him a
•
Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus ()
Originally posted at , the now-discontinued blog of the OU History of Science Collections. Neither this brev nor any of its content should be taken as an official communication of the University of Oklahoma.
We have recently made available, in its entirety, high resolution images of the most lavishly-illustrated treatise on the Earth in the 17th century:
Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus (). (Gallery; cf. two-page spreads.)
The range of interests displayed by Athanasius Kircher (–) is staggering, even in a century renowned for universal scholarship. Despite failed attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, he was a master of a dozen europeisk and Oriental languages. His forty-odd works include studies of the tower of Babel, ancient Egypt, China, mathematics, music, cosmology, optics, magnetism, and medicine. Both highly praised and an object of ridicule, these works served many seventeenth-century scholars as a ready-re
•
Scientist of the Day - Athanasius Kircher
Figured stones of birds, text engraving, Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, vol. 2, (Linda Hall Library)
Athanasius Kircher, A German Jesuit natural philosopher working in Rome, was born May 2, in or , in Fulda in central Germany. He came to Rome in and spent the rest of his life compiling massive scientific encyclopedias on all manner of subjects. We wrote a general introductory post on Kircher back in , in which we introduced Kircher and showed some images from a few of the 29 Kircher works in our collections, on subjects such as light, magnetism, cosmology, music, and cosmology.
Portrait of Athanasius Kircher, engraved frontispiece to his Mundus subterraneus, vol. 1, (Linda Hall Library)
Today we are going to look at Kircher’s published thoughts on a particular subject, fossils. In Kircher’s time, fossils were more commonly referred to as figured stones, and a collection of fossils might include all manner of