In Philip Ball's deeply weird and wonderful new book, "The Devil's Doctor," the man who might well be the prototype for that familiar mad-scientist figure -- the 16th century alchemist and epic wanderer Paracelsus -- neatly escapes the caricaturist's frame and emerges exuberantly and combatively alive. Hardly a hagiography, the book (subtitled, enticingly, "Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science") rescues from obscurity a man who, Ball argues, was a flesh-and-blood hinge between the medieval and the modern universe.# posted by
Gerry Canavan @ 12:46 AM
|