Abstract » Nejeschleba
Budapest 2010
Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560–1670
Tomáš NEJESCHLEBA
Iohannis Iessenii a Iessen, Novorum Problematum Centuriae quatuor: A Manuscript
Johannes Jessenius ranks among those thinkers from the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries who, as was usual in that period, often changed their position and residence. He was born in Breslau (Wroclaw) in Silesia, studied in Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Padua, and worked as a court physician in Dresden, as a professor of anatomy and surgery in Wittenberg, as rector of Wittenberg university, as a physician in Prague, as court physician in Vienna, and finally as rector of Prague University. He is known first of all as an anatomist who carried out the first public dissection in Prague in 1600, partially as an author and editor of certain philosophical writings, and also as a politician at the time of the beginning of the Thirty Years War who was executed in Prague in 1621 along with other exponents of the anti-Habsburg policy.
In his Wittenberg period Jessenius wrote and published certain books which are worth mentioning: beginning with his Zoroaster, a transcription and an excerpt from Francesco Patrizi’s book Nova de universis philosophia which attempted to create a new metaphysics of nature dividing the subject into Panarchia, Pancosmia and Panpsychia; followed by the edition of Girolamo Savonarola’s Universae philosophiae epitome, a complex view on the Aristotelian logic, natural philosophy, and ethics; to his Anatomiae, Pragae . . . historia summarising a traditional Vesalian anatomy.
My paper will focus on an almost uknown manuscript of Johannes Jessenius called Novorum problematum centuriae quatuor which was dedicated to the Saxon Duke Friedrich Wilhelm. The manuscript offers Jessenius’s answers on 404 questions taken pell-mell from different arts and sciences: astronomy, medicine, biology, alchemy, mythology, latin philology, etc. Though the work lacks a systematic view of the sciences and their order it could be linked into the encyclopedic literature of that period, and shows the efforts of an author with encyclopedic knowledge attempting to be viewed as a scientist.
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