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This article focuses on the idiosyncratic conception of happiness Sir Kenelm Digby develops in the letters he wrote after the death of his wife in 1633. It contextualises Digby's vision of happiness through an examination of the different traditions he revisits and appropriates to develop his personal and subjective ethics of self-care, mainly Renaissance Neoplatonism, the idealisation of conjugal love, the idealism of Italian poetry, and an ascetic model of widowhood linked to the tradition of spiritual mourning. It analyses how Digby's conception of happiness, through its vindication of subjectivity and excess, challenges the early modern ethos of consolation and speculates on the reasons that may have led Digby to present his readers with such an extraordinary self-portrait.

This article aims to bring out the problematic nature of condensation and rarefaction for early modern natural philosophers by considering two historically significant attempts to deal with it, first by Sir Kenelm Digby in his Treatise on Body (1644), and subsequently by Isaac Newton, chiefly in manuscript works associated with the Principia (1687). It is argued that Digby tried to sidestep the problem of variation in density and rarity by making it a fundamental starting point for his physics. But he also brought out the difficulties of dealing with condensation and rarefaction within the mechanical philosophy, whether that philosophy was plenist or allowed for void space. The problems became exacerbated after experiments with the air-pump achieved extreme rarefactions. It is argued that these led Newton to first consider a retiform or net-like structure of matter, before adopting the radical innovation of supposing repelling forces operating at a distance between the particles of the rarefied bodies. Eventually, Newton came to believe that extreme rarity was inexplicable ‘by any other means than a repulsive Power’.

The conceptual foundations of ecology were laid in the seventeenth century by the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, when he developed the idea of \"the oeconomy of nature.\" Digby transformed the practical agrarian discourse of \"natural oeconomy\" (household management), which links human beings to their environments, into the natural-philosophical concept of the oeconomy of nature. Using the oeconomic values of thrift, regularity, and efficient dispensation to conceptualize natural processes, Digby projected a human institution, with all its ideological baggage, onto the natural world. But, for Digby, closely observing nonhuman creatures in the framework of oeconomy opened up the more radical possibility of a decentered system, in which each creature is a potential householder, each the center of its own oeconomy of nature.

Kenelm Digby is now best remembered for his attempt at reconciling Aristotelianism with the new philosophies of his time. In his Two Treatises of 1644, Digby argued that, while the notion of form has no place in natural philosophy, it remains indispensable in metaphysics. This division of labor has not received much attention, but we argue that it played an important role in Digby’s thought. The notion of form is central to his account of bodily identity over time, but by removing it from the domain of natural philosophy, he avoids some of the standard criticism of forms in authors like Descartes. In the final part of this paper, we turn to Digby’s friend and follower, John Sergeant. We argue that, in Sergeant, we get an answer to the question of how the atomic parts out of which a body is built up relate to its form, which had remained open in Digby.

What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their national—and in some cases royalist—loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in England's church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake.

Restoration London saw a wave of publications by physicians advocating that the ‘compleat physician’ should be one who experimented and produced his own medicines. Only thus, they argued, could the medical hierarchy be restored and medical authority re-established on a defensible basis. This article seeks to explain the context for this unusual approach, and why it failed to attract mainstream physicians by the end of the century, by considering the sixty-year career of one of its leading advocates, Everard Maynwaring (c.1629–1713), a prolific medical author, and what his own failure to enter the medical establishment may show about the problems inherent in this model for the physician. A university-trained gentleman physician who converted to chymical medicine c.1660, Maynwaring published learned and relatively unpolemical texts to persuade both medical and lay audiences of the superiority of experimental medicine as a mode of learned practice, yet could not easily reconcile this with the advocacy and sale of his own chymical medicines (especially as he focused increasingly on a small group of ‘universal medicines’) without being branded an ‘empirick’. Fragmentary evidence regarding his career suggests he became increasingly marginalised, and as an old man was reduced to advertising his cures like the ‘empiricks’ from whom he had sought to distance both himself and physicians in general.

Although over eighty percent of the country is Muslim, Indonesia is marked by an extraordinary diversity in language, ancestry, culture, religion and ways of life. This book focuses on the Christian Dani of West Papua, providing a social and ethnographic history of the most important indigenous population in the troubled province. It presents a fascinating overview of the Dani’s conversion to Christianity, examining the social, religious and political uses to which they have put their new religion. Based on independent research carried out over many years among the Dani people, the book provides an abundance of new material on religious and political events in West Papua. Underlining the heart of Christian-Muslim rivalries, the book questions the fate of religion in late-modern times.