Daniel Stolzenberg is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis.
"Daniel Stolzenberg has a sure grasp of Athanasius Kircher's
infinite output, intricate thought, and complicated times. An
informed and sensitive treatment of a truly baroque character."
--Ingrid D. Rowland, University of Notre Dame
"If you don't already know about Athanasius Kircher, you should
take a long trip through his extraordinary and weird fields of
research: a Jesuit priest who tinkered with everything from early
cinematic projectors to talking statues, and wrote about impossibly
tall skyscrapers inspired by the Tower of Babel and developed his
own unique twist on a volcanic theory of a Hollow Earth. If Gizmodo
had been founded in the seventeenth century, Kircher would have
been its editor in chief. Stolzenberg's book is an excellent
biography of the man and his ideas."-- "Gizmodo's Notable Books of
2013"
"In Egyptian Oedipus, Daniel Stolzenberg not only provides the
first serious study of Athanasius Kircher's investigations into the
history and culture of ancient Egypt, but he also furnishes a
perceptive critical evaluation of Kircher's scholarship and
persona, warts and all. Stolzenberg goes beyond Kircher's
programmatic statements to unveil his actual scholarly practices.
In doing so, Stolzenberg has produced an exemplary case study of a
polymath at work and has provided us with a more nuanced
understanding of Kircher's influence."
--Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology
"In this lively and erudite book, Daniel Stolzenberg sets himself
the daunting task of making Athanasius Kircher legible to a modern
reader. How, he asks, can we understand a writer like Kircher
without making him a figure either of comedy or of awe? The answer
he gives is a tour-de-force reading of Kircher's central claim to
fame in the seventeenth century, his work on hieroglyphics. Along
the way, we learn much about the fate and function of occult
philosophy in the period, the operations of the early modern
republic of letters, and the place of Rome and early modern
Catholicism more generally in the intellectual landscape of early
modern Europe."
--Jonathan Sheehan, University of California, Berkeley
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