Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was a German Jesuit priest and polymath who spent most of his life in Rome. Kircher published a large number of large books on a very wide variety of subjects, such as Egyptology, geology, and music theory. Kircher's greatest work is Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-54) a vast study of Egyptology and comparative religion. He was not always critical, and he had a tendency to fill the holes in his knowledge with mere speculations. Nevertheless, his works, written in Latin, had a wide circulation in the seventeenth century, and they contributed to the dissemination of scientific information to a wider circle of readers.