Francis Mercury van Helmont

Physician, alchemist, friend of Leibniz and of Anne Conway, and Knorr's collaborator on the Kabbala Denudata. He took Lurianic ideas about the transmigration of souls seriously enough to argue them in print to a Christian audience.

The reminder that Christian Kabbalah was a live intellectual project among serious people, not a fringe — and that its purpose was harmonising, which is to say converting.