Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) on God, Freedom, and Contingency: An Early Modern Reformed Voice is the first study in English entirely devoted to the theology of Voetius, a leading figure of Reformed scholasticism. Andreas J. Beck examines Voetius's life and his concept of theology. Moreover, he provides a fresh and detailed analysis of Voetius's views on God, freedom, and contingency in the context of related early modern debates. Special attention is given to transconfessional relations and relevant backgrounds in patristic theology, medieval scholasticism, and the European Reformations. This study also advances our knowledge of scholarly practices in theological education at early modern Reformed universities in the Low Countries

The 1879-1898 beriberi controversy between the later Nobel prize laureate Christiaan Eijkman and his opponent, quarrel monger Evart van Dieren is a little known but highly amusing footnote to the history of the discovery of Vitamin-B. This paper examines the dynamics in this controversy with the aid of published as well as unpublished documents. The emphasis in this paper is on the attempts from within the medical field to exclude outsider Van Dieren. The fact that this attempt was unsuccessful may be counted as success for Van Dieren who was otherwise a complete failure. In the conclusion of this paper, this success is explained in term of two illusions: that of the perfect and of the ideal community.

t has been argued that physics and astronomy served the international geopolitical interests of European powers during the nineteenth century. This notion can be applied to the situation in the Dutch East Indies around this time, and provided a beneficial situation for J.A.C. Oedemans who was able to pursue his interest in astronomy. During his stay in the Dutch East Indies, from 1857 to 1875, Oedemans carried out a range of astronomical observations, including variable stars and the 1868 and 1871 total solar eclipses. He also tried to observe the 1874 transit of Venus. But his primary task was to co-ordinate the trigonometrical survey of the Dutch East Indies. In this chapter we will briefly explore his astronomical activities while in the Dutch East Indies and show how he tried to contribute to science by observing the 1868 and 1871 total solar eclipses, both of which were important for the advancement of solar physics.

his article takes up the production of ignorance in early modern academic information circulation by focusing on the question of how information changes from being present to being absent in the medium of the learned journal—in short, how knowledge becomes forgotten. To examine the processes behind this change, I have selected four exemplary late-seventeenth- to early-eighteenth-century scholars: Johannes Braun (1628–1708), Thomas Gale (1636–1702), Adriaan Reland (1676–1718), and Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720), and tracked their reception over the course of the eighteenth century, as indicated by patterns of references to them in learned journals. To this end, I chose four exemplary eighteenth-century learned journals, the [Nova] Acta Eruditorum, the Journal des Savants, the Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt, and the Philosophical Transactions, and searched digitally for all references to the four scholars between 1 January 1701 and 31 December 1800. Each journal page bearing at least one reference to one of these scholars is treated as a textual unit for the extraction of co-citation data. These co-citation data were then used as material for a diachronic network analysis of the reference patterns. The results show that the frequency of references made to all four scholars began to decline demonstrably in the middle of the eighteenth century and that by the last quarter they had become forgotten, that is, effectively “ignored.” These processes turn out to be context-sensitive and not determined by the quality of the contributions of those who became forgotten.