Athanasius Kircher's Phonurgia Nova: The Marvelous World of Sound during the 17th Century

Athanasius Kircher became a Jesuit in 1628 in Mainz, Germany. He taught in Wurzburg, Germany in 1629 and in Avignon, France in 1631. Afterwards, in 1633 he was invited to Vienna, Austria to take up Kepler's former post as Mathematician at the Court of Ferdinand II. However, during his journey across Northern Italy, Pope Urbano VIII called Kircher to Rome, where he moved and is known to have taught Mathematics and Hebrew at the Collegium Romanum. After eight years, he was released from teaching, and he focused exclusively on studying hieroglyphs. At this time he began to collect many items from all over the world and in 1651 founded his Kircherian Museum. Kircher's Phonurgia nova expresses a wish to enrich and widen the knowledge already existing in the field of architectural and musical acoustics. Written in Latin, the Phonurgia nova is an original mixture of Baroque aesthetics and sonic enquiry.