Abstract » Szőnyi
Budapest 2010
Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560–1670
György E. SZONYI
John Dee’s Legacy and Late Humanist Hermeticism: Aspects of Geographic Distribution (England and Central Europe) and Questions of Chronology
Professor R.J.W. Evans, in his The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (1979), uncovered various occult and hermeticist tendencies still prevalent in Central Europe in the seventeenth century that were connected to international networks of late Humanism. Thirty years later it is possible to fine-tune some of his views, and in my paper I contribute two points:
1. Evans interpreted John Dee’s widespread popularity in Central Europe as a sign of the conservative ideology of patronage and late Humanism in the Habsburg Empire. I plan to review Dee’s fortunes both in England and in Europe and suggest that Central Europe showed no radical divergence from other parts of the Continent.
2. My second point concerns chronology and I would like to argue that Evans’s final date of 1700, and this conference’s upper limit of 1670, do not mark a radical watershed. In fact, encyclopedism and pansophia, with their accompanying interests in hermeticism and other trends of Western esotericism (for example, Jewish/Christian cabala) continued well into the 18th century.
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