Athanasius Kircher's rise from obscurity and derision to a prominent, if still ambiguous, position in the history of early modern science and scholarship began slowly around the tercentenary of his death in 1982, and achieved escape velocity with the flurry of events and publications that attended his four-hundredth birthday in 2001–2002. The late John Fletcher got there first. Between 1967 and 1988 the Australian scholar published some twenty articles and a volume of conference proceedings devoted to the ‘incredible German’ Jesuit polymath. Sadly, Fletcher died in 1992 without witnessing the eruption of Kirchermania in the new millennium. The book under review is an unusual publication, consisting of Fletcher's unrevised dissertation, submitted to the University of London in 1966, together with a translation of Kircher's autobiography. (Despite the subtitle it does not contain selections from Kircher correspondence beyond quotations of brief passages.)

Part One of Fletcher's book presents a ‘biographical sketch’, followed by five thematic chapters surveying Kircher's published work, including investigations of hieroglyphs, musicology, antiquarianism and various ‘scientific’ fields, such as microscopy, optics, medicine, chemistry and astronomy. The core of the book is a study of Kircher's unpublished correspondence, primarily the documents preserved in Rome's Gregorian University, but also materials from other collections. Part Two treats letters written to Kircher, while Part Three treats those written by him. For Fletcher, Kircher is an ambivalent figure, representative of a period of transition between the traditions of Scholasticism and Neoplatonism and ‘a new scientific age of empirical observation … In one work he derides alchemy, but in the very same book he discusses dragons, postulating their subdivision by the number of dorsal spikes’ (pp. 81–82). But Fletcher's study is not built around an interpretation of Kircher or his relation to seventeenth-century scholarship. Long and not fully digested, its method is primarily descriptive rather than analytic. After dividing Kircher's correspondents into categories such as ‘persons of quality’, ‘fellow Jesuits’ and ‘men of science’, Fletcher summarizes their letters in alphabetical order, a structure convenient for recording information but not especially conducive to building an argument or pursuing a topic in depth. Trained as a Germanist, Fletcher is at his best when placing Kircher in German literary contexts. The book admirably avoids the common tendency of dissertations to inflate their subject matter. In a characteristic comment Fletcher notes judiciously, ‘It is rather startling to realize how great a proportion of letters written to Kircher by various learned and famous men say nothing at all’ (p. 304).

As an unrevised dissertation the work unsurprisingly contains repetitions and contradictions. For example, at one point Fletcher describes Kircher as never leaving Rome after 1638, only to document a later visit to Tuscany in a subsequent chapter. As a work completed nearly half a century ago Fletcher's study is inevitably out of date. Had it appeared in the 1970s or 1980s – or even in the 1990s – it would have had more relevance. Subsequent scholarship has superseded the chapters devoted to Kircher's science and scholarship. Readers interested in an accessible English-language overview of Kircher's life and work will be better served by Jocelyn Godwin's recent synthesis, Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World (2009). But in the biographical sketch and, above all, the descriptions of the correspondence, anyone researching Kircher will find much useful information – a considerable amount still unavailable elsewhere. For example, Fletcher's recounting of Kircher's anxious effort to learn whether his sister, who married a Calvinist, died a Catholic, adds a poignant personal dimension to an extraordinary passage in his astronomical dialogue, Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656), in which Kircher's surrogate, Theophilus, cannot bring himself to declare all Protestants damned to Hell. Having recently completed a book on Kircher, I wish I had been able to consult this volume during its preparation.

Although Fletcher's study will be an essential reference for investigators of Kircher's correspondence (now consultable online thanks to the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project), in my experience his summaries of letters occasionally contain significant omissions or errors and should not be taken as substitutes for studying the original documents. Fletcher surveyed a vast amount of uncharted territory and the results should to be taken as he described them in the dissertation's original subtitle: ‘a preliminary study’. The freshest, most valuable section of the work is Part Four, an annotated translation of Kircher's autobiography. Composed in Latin and published posthumously in 1684, Kicher's Vita was hitherto unavailable in English. Fletcher's highly readable translation complements the recent critical edition with French and Italian translations that appeared in 2009. The book is prefaced by two texts that place Fletcher's work in relation to subsequent scholarship: Jocelyn Godwin's foreword and Gary Trompf's introductory essay, which focuses on Kircher's relation to Western esotericism. A brief preface by Elizabeth Bishop (the author's widow and editor of the manuscript) and a biographical sketch by Brian Taylor offer an overview of Fletcher's career, and an appendix contains a bibliography of his publications.