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What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers.
 
From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

The Great Schism (1378–1417) divided Western Christendom into two groups: those who recognized a pope in Rome and those who recognized one in Avignon. It was a crisis of authority that brought with it spiritual anxiety and political uproar. This book presents the responses of two fascinating women whose experiences demonstrate the impact of the Schism on ordinary Christians. Constance de Rabastens (active 1384–1386), who lived in a village in rural Languedoc, had dramatic visions indicting the Avignon pope Clement VII, despite his being recognized in her region. Ursulina of Parma (1375–1408), a diminutive young woman from an urban milieu in Italy, believed that she was commanded by Christ to engage in shuttle diplomacy between the Roman and Avignon papacies in order to end the Schism. Two Women of the Great Schism translates an account of Constance’s visionary experiences as recorded by her confessor Raymond de Sabanac and a posthumous biography of Ursulina by Simone Zanacchi, a pious abbot who wrote some sixty years after his subject’s death. These texts bring to life the extraordinary spiritual and political engagement of two late medieval women who refused to be passive bystanders as rival papal factions tore Christendom apart.

Although authors of mystical treatises and dream visions shared a core set of assumptions about how visions are able to impart transcendent truths to their recipients, the modern divide between “religious” and “secular” has led scholars to study these genres in isolation. Willing to Know God addresses the simultaneous flowering of mystical and literary vision texts in the Middle Ages by questioning how the vision was thought to work. What preconditions must be met in these texts for the vision to transform the visionary? And when, as in poems such as Pearl, this change does not occur, what exactly has gone wrong?