The ArgumentThis paper focuses on several Italian Jewish philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. It argues that their writings share a certain theology of nature. Because of it, the interest of Jews in the study of nature was not a proto-scientific but a hermeneutical activity based on the essential correspondence between God, Torah, and Israel. While the theology of nature analyzed in the paper did not prevent Jews from being (...) informed about and selectively endorsing the first phase of the scientific revolution, it did render the Jews marginal to it. So long as Jewish thinkers adhered to this theology of nature, Jews could not adopt the scientific mentality that presupposed a qualitative distinction between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. (shrink)

The practices of Galenic pharmacy that dominated the Western pharmaceutical tradition throughout the medieval and early modern periods generally eschewed methods of alchemical processing and the use of high heat. A unique 10th-century Arabic pharmaceutical treatise, the Kitab al Tasrif by al-Zahrāwī/Abulcasis, however, discussed thermo-chemical techniques of distillation, calcination, and sublimation at length and would go on to have a major impact on Galenic pharmacy. It included recipes, for example, for two highly important distilled substances – rosewater and Philosophers' Oil (...) – that were copied and revised in Latin texts from the later Middle Ages and early modern Spanish formularies. By the end of the 16th century, these recipes had formed the basis for two new categories of distilled medicines – distilled waters and distilled oils – in Galenic pharmacy. Their inclusion in the Galenic formulary indicates that apothecaries in the Latin West were familiar with and indeed practicing thermo-chemical operations during the medieval and early modern periods. (shrink)