"In this book John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of enlightenment were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the “darker” pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy. He follows some of the complexities and contradictions of the “Age of Lights” into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring: the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro and the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic Julie de Krüdener."
"... this work documents for the first time a subset of early-modern points of intersection between natural history and German-language poetry. Its position as a foundational work in the history of literature and science is assured by the over twenty texts, mostly by anonymous poet-alchemists, all of them informative examples of early-modern poetic expression of knowledge about the natural sciences, along with essays that focus on Latin, French, English, and Italian language alchemical poetry (Didier Kahn, Paris) and on the essential features of the history of European didactic poetry (Wilhelm Kuhlmann, Heidelberg)."
