From the dust jacket: "In this thorough and meticulously researched study of Fludd, William H. Huffman places the man and his ideas in context by exploring the background of the late Renaissance. Fludd's ideas, derived from his early education, and shaped at Elizabethan Oxford and by six years' travel in Europe, were very much a product of his time. He was a respected, prominent and orthodox physician in early Stuart England during and after the time his books were published, and his circle of friends included some of the most important figures of his time. Acceptrance of his ideas was underscored by royal patronage, and he was not, as often alleged, a member of the Rosicrucians. Huffman shows how in Fludd's debates with Keppler, Mersenne and others, crucial changes were taking place in a mixture of new and old ideas. Fludd's great synthesis of Renaissance Christian Neoplatonism passed from the scene as the Renaissance came to an end and the modern world came into being."