The 16th & 17th centuries were also the great age of belief in, fear of, and persecution of witches -- in contrast to medieval Europe, which, in the thousand years from Augustine to Occam, didn't believe in witches (cf. the Canon episcopi, ca. 900 CE). --CGE
Carrol Cox wrote:
> ... I'm not sure, incidentally, that astrology was more important in
> the middle ages than in the "Renaissance" -- in many ways
> superstition _increased_ greatly during the 16th & 17th centuries,
> Plato offering more room for it than did Aristotle. And this
> 'flowering' of strange superstition was not a wholly separate
> phenomenon from the growth of science (cf. the strange ideas Newton
> pursued when he was not doiing optics or gravity). Alchemy, for
> example, flourished more in the Renaissance than in the middle
> ages...