ABSTRACT
Amos Funkenstein has written that: “‘the new” often consists not in the invention of new categories or new figures of thought, but rather in a surprising employment of existing ones’.1 In this essay, I would like to apply this observation to the way in which, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new idea of the individual was being advanced in the field of the natural sciences and theology. The hypothesis of my research, which is still very much at an embryonic stage, can be expressed more or less in the following terms. In the post-Tridentine or postReformation age, the progress of science, understood in terms of the systematic investigation of nature, took place against the background of a theological imagination which was, in several respects, fired up and ready to fill the entire fabric of human life with orthodox content. It was, furthermore, an imagination called into question by continuous comparisons made with points of view which derived from different visions fed by other cultures and religious traditions.
