Publisher's Synopsis
Both Boehme and his milieu are seen as important in this study. The editor attempts to present his writings not as the eccentric outpourings of a religious maniac or an unbalanced visionary but rather as the flowering of a long and noble religious and philosophical inheritance.;Waterfield believes that it is necessary to view his ideas against the background to his life in the last years of the 16th century in Germany. He considers his writing in the light of his intellectual grounding in alchemy and astrology. He looks also at the influences on his development: Caspar Schwenkfeld for whom the only Church was the invisible Church whose members were freely united in bonds of mutual tolerance; the theories of Copernicus; the movement known as Rosicrucianism which called for a "Reformatio Nova" establishing Christ's reign in men's hearts and sweeping away Babel - the worldly wrangling, power-seeking and enmity seen both amongst religious people and in the secular world of politics and diplomacy; Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel.
