The New Paracelsus Edition
The New Paracelsus Edition primarily aims at the edition of Paracelsus's unpublished theological works. Since the shipwreck of Kurt Goldammer's edition of the theological works in 1986 a whole fourth of the complete works of Paracelsus still remained inedited. The six volumes published by Goldammer amounted to only half of what was planned. Since then, the requirements for the edition of historical texts have changed significantly.
Also Goldammer's thematic arrangement of the works and their distribution on the individual volumes did not withstand the newest insights any more. It therefore did not seem appropriate to simply continue Goldammer's edition, but rather to establish a New Paracelsus Edition based on new prerequisites.
Goldammer had tried to subject the edition texts to a theological system and to sort them accordingly. The result consisted of thematic groups such as writings on the Virgin Mary, ethics, marriage, baptism, penance, the Lord's Supper, dogmatics and others. Goldammer did not take into account that there were often connections between certain writings of the individual groups and that Paracelsus therefore in certain cases had a different arrangement in mind. Not infrequently only fragments of an originally larger context intended by Paracelsus were handed down.
The New Paracelsus Edition now attempts to sort and edit the texts according to these historical and content-related features and to restore the original context. In this way, work entities emerge such as the "Vita Beata Writings", the "Five Tracts of Beatitude", the "Philosophia de limbo aeterno" and the "Philosophia Magna".