The Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz (1606-1682) spent about ten years of his life in Prague - "the most novelistic and radiant in a life-story that was already stranger than fiction", as Henry Sullivan has suggestively written. The papers in this volume hope to shed new light on this central period of his life, but also to give new insights of the intellectual achievements of an author to whom his contemporaries and first biographers referred only in superlatives. It is also a way to document more extensively the intellectual life of what can be seen as the founding epoch of intellectual Mitteleuropa, a tradition that would last until the first part of the twentieth century, befor being torn apart by the Nazi disaster and the Cold War.