ABSTRACT
Throughout his works, Praetorius devotes a great deal of attention to the strange and unusual, to natural and preternatural creatures. In the Anthropodemus, Praetorius gathers an amazingly rich and varied collection of wonders concerning humans and humanlike creatures. Judging from the chronology of the Anthropodemus, two years elapsed between the publication of the first and second volumes. The Anthropodemus must be seen as a compelling example of Praetorius's efforts at popularizing knowledge and information for this readership. Bursting with a seemingly limitless variety of tales, cultural, historical, and geographical information, hearsay, and authoritative testimony and personal experiences, the Anthropodemus is part of an early modern literary genre that "hurries secrets of nature to public knowledge." Praetorius refers to Paracelsus's theories of elemental spirits at various points throughout the Anthropodemus and in some of his other writings, although not without conveying his persistent ambivalence toward Paracelsus on more than one occasion.
