ABSTRACT
Some years after serving as disciple and assistant to Athanasius Kircher, Gaspar Schott still carried the indelible stamp of his mentor. He was fond of mentioning Kircher in his own works and of describing, enthusiastically, some of Kircher’s more implausible ideas. Unlike his mentor, however, Schott remains largely unknown today. During his lifetime, much of his notoriety came from his association with Kircher: he edited the latter’s controversial Iterum extaticum, which raised eyebrows among the Society’s censors for what some saw as a tacit endorsement of heliocentrism, and he also spent some time working in the Kircherian museum before his superiors sent him back to Germany. From those northern hinterlands, Schott produced a number of texts that clearly bear the hallmarks of Kircher’s own intellectual project. In one of these texts, the Physica curiosa, we have already seen that Schott pronounced an end to the occult power of the remora; in the Magia universalis naturae et artis (1657–1659) and the Technica curiosa (1664), he more explicitly considered how to expose the myriad marvels of nature.
