Abstract In the academic year 1599–1600, Daniel Sennert offered a course on natural philosophy at the University of Wittenberg. When it was finished, he bundled the set of 26 disputations that accompanied the course into a separate publication and entitled it Epitome naturalis scientiæ . Although he was professor of medicine from 1602 onwards, he continued to work on natural philosophy and published three further versions of his Epitome , now in the form of a textbook. This article offers a comparative analysis of all four versions, dated 1599/1600, 1618, 1624, and 1632/33 respectively. It documents that Sennert insisted on the importance of providing students with a coherent body of doctrine, which he felt had to be Aristotelian, but at the same time introduced new empirical material into his textbooks. While these additions worked well in the case of his natural historical inserts, they were problematic in the case of his turn to an atomistic theory of matter, and they involved a full contradiction in the case of cosmology. Sennert’s case illustrates a key problem for university pedagogues in the pre-Cartesian part of the seventeenth century – namely, that of maintaining a coherent curriculum in the face of mounting counterevidence against the traditional framework.
Christoph Lüthy (Thu,) studied this question.