ABSTRACT
Following the work of recent historians, much more is now known of Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) and the natural-philosophical, medical, and religious traditions which influenced him.1 Sennert and many of his colleagues and forebears at Luther’s university had benefited from the non-Thomistic Aristotelianism of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) and Jacopo Zabarella (1533-1589), as well as a variety of other sixteenth-century medical humanists.2 Sennert himself took a special interest in Aristotle’s Meteorology IV, the chemistry of Andreas Libavius (c. 1555-1616), and the alchemical minimae in the Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber.3 This emphasis on Aristotle’s natural philosophy at Wittenberg was facilitated by the educational reforms that Philipp Melanchthon (14971560) had enacted in the previous century, which likewise led to a tradition of anatomy of which Sennert was a clear beneficiary.4 Sennert, however, departed from Melanchthon and his intellectual heir, Caspar Peucer (1525-1602), in his adoption and development of atomism – a topic that these Wittenberg intellectuals had specifically criticised.5 Nevertheless, Lutheranism has been shown to be important to other areas of Sennert’s work, and namely the traducianism in Sennert’s philosophy of generation.6
