The Sabbatean Prophets

Notes to Pages 25–26 183
100. Ibid., chs. 27, 28, 34, and 36, respectively. See also ch. 38 on R. Jacob Emden, a
great enemy of the Sabbateans.
101. See Don C. Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel About Astrology and Its
Influence in England (New York: Octagon Books, 1973); Mircea Eliade, The Myth
of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971), pp. 143–45 and passim.
102. Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1983), 18.
103. Ibid.
104. Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology
of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
105. Ibid., 3.
106. See Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans.
M. Domandi (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 120–22, who minimizes
the determinative power ascribed to the stars by Kepler; for another view see
Sheila J. Rabin, “Kepler’s Attitude Toward Pico and the Anti-Astrology Polemic,”
Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 750–70; J. R. Christianson, “Tycho
Brahe’s German Treatise on the Comet of 1577,” Isis 70 (1979):
107. See Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, ch. 3. Dee was also deeply involved
with other prophetic methods, particularly conversations with angels. On this
see Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and
the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Harkness’s
work shows the connection between eschatology, science, alchemy, Kabbalah,
and universal redemption.
108. See Elizabeth Labrousse, L’entrée de Saturne au lion (l’éclipse de soleil du 12 août
1654) (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); Christianson, “Tycho Brahe’s German
Treatise”; Åkerman, Queen Christina, 161–165; C. Doris Hellman, The Comet of
1577: Its Place in the History of Astronomy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1944), ch. 8; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Ch. 10–12; Sara J.
Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998); Schechner, “Newton and the Ongoing Teleological
Role of Comets,” in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of
Newton and Halley, ed. N. J. W. Thrower (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 299–311.
109. Moshe Idel, “Shabbatai [Saturn] the Planet and Shabbatai Zvi: A New Approach
to Sabbateanism,” [Hebrew] Jewish Studies 37 (1997): 161–84.
110. See L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New
York: Zone Books, 1998); Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture,
ed. P. G. Platt (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999); Ambroise Paré on
Monsters and Marvels, trans. and ed. J. L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982); Niccoli, Prophecy and People, chs. 2, 5.
111. The Thirty Years’ War itself was not lacking in messianic significance. See
Haase, Das Problem des Chiliasmus.
112. See Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life