Abstract

If anyone ever lived up to our image of a baroque Universalgelehrter, it may have been the Jesuit natural philosopher Athanasius Kircher, whose life and interests spanned most of the 17th century. In his prolific career, Kircher wrote at least 14 major works, on subjects as varied as light, magnetism, music, geology, combinatorics, and Sinology. Thomas Leinkauf’s thorough, penetrating study of Kircher’s life and work does a tremendous job of making the Jesuit’s work both comprehensible and fascinating, as well as granting us a vision of the inner workings of Kircher’s mind, a mind formed both by his period and his position in the history of ideas, and driven by an unusual creativity and capacity for synthesis.