Duncan Liddel (1561-1613)

This collective volume in the history of early-modern science and medicine investigates the transfer of knowledge between Germany and Scotland focusing on the Scottish mathematician and physician Duncan Liddel of Aberdeen. It offers a contextualized study of his life and work in the cultural and institutional frame of the northern European Renaissance, as well as a reconstruction of his scholarly networks and of the scientific debates in the time of post-Copernican astronomy, Melanchthonian humanism and Paracelsian controversies.

Contributors are: Sabine Bertram, Duncan Cockburn, Laura Di Giammatteo, Mordechai Feingold, Karin Friedrich, Elizabeth Harding, John Henry, Richard Kirwan, Jane Pirie, Jonathan Regier.

Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Ph.D., Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, is member of the Collective Research Centre Episteme in Bewegung, Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on science, philosophy and literature in the Early Modern Period, as well as on historical epistemology.

Karin Friedrich is professor of early modern European History at the University of Aberdeen. She is co-director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies and specialises on early modern social and intellectual history in Germany and East Central Europe.

“This is a rich and very valuable book. It is also an exemplary volume that throws light not only on a rather unknown figure in the history of science but also on sixteenth-century scholarly life in general.”
Rienk Vermij, University of Oklahoma. In: Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2017), pp. 482-483.