The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy

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Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Barbara Obrist and Antonio Clericuzio for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. They are not responsible for any errors it contains.

Notes

¹ Demosthenes, On the Crown, 2; in Demosthenes, Speeches 18 and 19, tr. Harvey Yunis (Austin, TX, 2005), 32. See also Yunis's excellent edition of the Greek text, Demosthenes. On the Crown (Cambridge, 2001), 107.

²See his essay, ‘Reflections on Newton's Alchemy in the Light of the New Historiography of Alchemy’, in Newton and Newtonianism. New Studies, edited by James E. Force and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2004), 205–19.

³C. Anne Wilson, ‘Philosophers, Iōsis and Water of Life’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, 19 (1984), 101–219, ‘Summary’, 200.

⁴Robert Halleux, ‘Alchemy’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford, 1996), 52–53.

⁵See, e.g., A.J. Festugière, La Révélation d'Hermès Trismegiste 1: L'Astrologie et les sciences occultes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1950), ch. 7, ‘L'Hermétisme et l'alchimie’ (217–82); Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaft im Islam (Leiden, 1972 = Handbuch der Orientalistik), 145–270, Paul Kraus, Jabir ibn Hayyan. Contribution à l'histoire des idées scientifiques en Islam. Jabir et la science grècque (Cairo, 1942; Paris, 1986), 187–303.

⁶Robert Halleux, Les Textes Alchimiques (Turnhout, 1979; ‘Typologie des sources de moyen age occidental’, fasc. 32), 37–38.

⁸Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest: Including Boyle's “Lost” Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 189.

⁷William R. Newman, The ‘Summa Perfectionis’ of the Pseudo-Geber (Leiden, 1991), 90–98.

⁹For critical comments on Newman having ignored the ‘religious and mystical’ element in alchemy, see Scott Mandelbrote's review of Gehennical Fire in The British Journal for the History of Science, 30 (1997), 109–11, and for a sustained critique of Newman and Principe's ‘devaluation of religious sentiments’ see Hereward Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the Work of Count Michael Maier (1569–1622) (Berlin, 2003). I do not favour Tilton's use of Jungian concepts, but he does bring out the unquestionably mystical dimension of Maier's work. See also Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustrations (Leiden, Netherlands, 2000), which discusses astrological and religious influences on the work of John Dee, Heinrich Khunrath, Robert Fludd, and Maier.

¹⁰See Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 187. Principe refers to Deborah Harkness, Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999), a study which accepts Dee's belief that Kelley really brought him into contact with angelic powers. For the contrary view, that Dee was the victim of a cruel hoax, see, e.g., Wayne Shumaker, Renaissance Curiosa (Binghamton, NY, 1982), 15–52.

¹¹Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 197n.; Michael Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Monarchism in the Thought of Robert Boyle’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 387–410 at 396–98 for Boyle's Dialogue on Spirits (which Principe reprints in an appendix to The Aspiring Adept [note 8], 310–16) and Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends (London, 1994).

¹²Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 188–201, 310–17.

¹³See Clericuzio's review of Alchemy Tried in the Fire in Annals of Science 62 (2005), 406–408, at 407.

¹⁴See Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 115–34, especially 128, where he argues that ‘to dismiss’ this episode, in which Pierre duped Boyle out of an enormous sum of money, would be ‘not only too facile but somewhat besides the point, and smacks too much of the dismissive spirit that once rejected all of alchemical thought as unworthy of investigation’. But equally, to record it must establish the vulnerability of alchemy to these accusations. Trying to draw a veil over Boyle's gullibility, Principe prefers to take it as proving his ‘great eagerness to acquire alchemical knowledge’ (133). But it was precisely such eagerness that could be exploited by unscrupulous alchemists.

¹⁵Lawrence M. Newman and William R. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2002), 225; Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 178–79.

¹⁶Brian Vickers, ‘The Discrepancy between res and verba in Greek Alchemy’, in Alchemy Revisited, edited by Z.R.W.M. von Martels (Leiden, Netherlands, 1990), 21–33; German translation als ‘Alchemie als verbale Kunst: die Anfänge’, in Chemie und Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Jürgen Mittelstrass and Günther Stock (Berlin: Akademie, 1992), 17–34.

¹⁷For some illustrations showing vast tomes propped up on the alchemist's work-bench, see Vickers, ‘Alchemie als verbale Kunst’ (note 16), 31–34.

¹⁸Respectively, those supposedly able to produce gold and silver from base metals.

¹⁹In their earlier study, Newman and Principe suggested that Starkey may have ‘decided that his first preparation was not the correct one’ (Alchemy Tried in the Fire [note 15], 104n., 128, 200). However, Starkey nowhere hints at this possibility.

²⁰Newton's commentary on the ‘Emerald Tablet’ was translated by Betty Jo Dobbs in The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge, 1991), 276–77, and reprinted in Stanton J. Linden's useful anthology, The Alchemy Reader. From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 2003), 246–47.

²¹Kassell notes that ‘A treatise on cachelah’ circulated among Dee's circle in the 1580s, and suggests that the word ‘cako’ derives from ‘the Hebrew “Kochav” meaning star, perhaps indicating the star regulus of antimony’ (179), or quicksilver, which is produced when metalline antimony is further refined with other metals.

²²For further details of Forman's eclectic reading, see chapter three, ‘How to Write Like a Magus’ (54–74), 57, 68 (‘he drew heavily on Latin astrological texts, often denigrating their authors while flaunting his own learning’), 163, 174, 186 (on ‘Forman's doctrinal and practical eclecticism’), 188, and the Bibliography of ‘Simon Forman's Principal Manuscripts’ (233–40).

²³Mordechai Feingold, ‘A Conjurer and a Quack? The Lives of John Dee and Simon Forman’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 545–59, at 545. The truth of this observation can be confirmed from Steven W. May's recent and magisterial Elizabethan Poetry. A Bibliography and First-line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, 3 vols (London, 2004). See my review in Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 2006, 7.

²⁴For further details of Forman's use of Galenic medicine, see Barbara H. Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago, 2001).

²⁵See A.L. Rowse, Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age (London, 1974), and Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981). Mordechai Feingold has singled out the ‘sexual context’ of Forman's dreams as providing invaluable insights into his ‘fixation on power relations’ and his exploitation of women: ‘It is impossible to evaluate Forman's career without considering his incessant preying on women, for his lucrative practice depended on the support of the numerous women he seduced—literally and figuratively’ (‘A Conjurer and a Quack?’ [note 23], 550).

²⁶A.J. Close, ‘Commonplace Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity and in the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969), 467–86.

²⁷See, e.g., André Pellicier, Natura: Etude sémantique et histoire du mot latin (Paris, 1966); James A. Weisheipl, ‘The Concept of Nature’, in W.E. Carroll (ed), Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC, 1985), 1–23.

²⁸All quotations from Aristotle are from Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1984).

²⁹ Aristotle's Physics Books I and II., translated with Introduction and Notes by W. Charlton (Oxford, 1970), xvi–xvii. See also 51, 88.

³⁰Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia. Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 212, 227. See the full discussion of ‘Nature and Counternature’, 212–25; Close, ‘Commonplace Theories’ (note 27), 469–80.

³¹Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia. Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 212, 227. See the full discussion of ‘Nature and Counternature’, 212–25; Close, ‘Commonplace Theories’ (note 27), 467.

³²Charlton, Aristotle's Physics (note 30), 90

³³Cf. also Met. 9.3, 1047a35ff.; EN 2.4, 1105b22ff.; Pol. 4.1, 1288b10–21. On the connotations of ars by the thirteenth century, see Michael R. McVaugh, ‘Medical Certitude at Montpellier’, Osiris, 2nd ser., 6 (1990), 62–84 at 71, and Hélène Merle, ‘Ars’, Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, 28 (1986), 95–133.

³⁴Irma A. Richter (ed.), Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford, 1952), 10.

³⁵Newman ascribes to Eymerich ‘a visceral antipathy to alchemy’ (94), although Newman shows that he merely echoed Aristotle and Aquinas; he is at once ‘extremely conservative’ and ‘intransigent’.

³⁶According to Newman, this treatise had ‘never been printed, or for that matter analyzed’ until he produced a ‘partial working edition’ in his doctoral dissertation (Harvard, MA, 1968). Indeed, it was ‘[un]known to the three Scholastic authors of the mid-thirteenth century most concerned with alchemy, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon’; William R. Newman, ‘Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages’, Isis, 80 (1989), 423–45 at 430. However, it is quite well known to modern historians of alchemy.

³⁷ Constantine of Pisa: The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy (Leiden, Netherlands, 1990); Les débuts de l'imagerie alchimique (14e–15e siècles) (Paris, 1982).

³⁸Barbara Obrist,‘Art et nature dans l'alchimie médiévale’, Revue d'Histoire des Sciences, 49 (1996), 215–86; ‘Les rapports d'analogie entre philosophie et alchimie médiévale’, in Alchimie et Philosophie à la Reniassance, edited by J.-C. Margolin and S. Matton (Paris, 1993), 44–64; ‘Die Alchemie in der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft’, in Die Alchemie in der europäischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, edited by Christoph Meinel (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1986), 33–59; ‘Vers une histoire de l'alchimie médiévale’, Micrologus, 3 (1995), 3–43. I refer to these essays by their publication date, thus ‘1996, 220’. All translations are mine.

³⁹See Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, edited by Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1984, 2005), 95–163.

⁴⁰The Latin text reads: ‘ergo videtur, quod si potestas artis operetur super corporum transmutationes, ut alchimiae, quod daemones hoc multo magis vacere praevaleant’ (47 note).

⁴¹Two recent wide-ranging handbooks have each only a single mention of alchemy: see The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, edited by N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (Cambridge, 1982), 506—one reference only in a volume of 1,000 pages; and none at all in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, edited by A.S. McGrade (Cambridge, 2003).

⁴²Elsewhere, Newman has written that ‘alchemical writers, unlike those in the mainstream of the Scholastic tradition, were willing to argue that human art, even if it learned by imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them’: Newman ‘Technology and Alchemical Debate’ (note 37) (my italics).

⁴³ Jabir ibn Hayyan, 119–34, discussing the Arabic texts and their putative Greek sources.

⁴⁶The full German text reads as follows:

Nun ist aber auch die generation der homunculi in keinen weg zu vergessen. dan etwas ist daran, wiewol solches bisher in grosser heimlikeit und gar verborgen ist gehalten worden und nit ein kleiner zweifel und frag under etlichen der alten philosophis gewesen, ob auch der natur und kunst möglich sei, das ein mensch ausserthalben weiblichs leibs und einer natürlichen muter möge geboren werden? darauf gib ich die antwort das es der kunst spagirica und der natur in keinem weg zuwider, sonder gar wol möglich sei. wie aber solches zugang und geschehen möge, ist nun sein process also, nemlich das der sperma eines mans in verschlossnen cucurbiten per se mit der höchsten putrefaction, ventre equino, putreficirt werde auf 40 tag oder so lang bis er lebendig werde und sich beweg und rege, welchs leichtlich zu sehen ist. nach solcher zeit wird es etlicher massen einem menschen gleich sehen, doch durchsichtig on ein corpus. so er nun nach disem reglich mit dem arcano sanguinis humani gar weislich gespeiset und erneret wird bis auf 40 wochen und in steter gleicher werme ventris equini erhalten, wird ein recht lebendig menschlich kint daraus mit allen glitmassen wie ein ander kint, das von einem weib geboren wird, doch vil kleiner. dasselbig wir ein homunculum nennen und sol hernach nit anders als ein anders kind mit grossem fleiss und sorg auferzogen werden, bis es zu seinen tagen und verstant kompt. das ist nun der aller höchsten und grössesten heimlikeiten eine, die got den tötlichen und sündigen menschen hat wissen lassen. dan es ist ein mirakel und magnale dei und ein geheimnis uber alle geheimnus, sol auch bilich ein geheimnus bleiben bis zu den aler lesten zeiten, da dan nichts verborgen wird bleiben sonder alles offenbaret werden.

Sudhoff, Paracelsus (note 45), 11.316–17. Newman does not quote the two concluding sentences, occluding the religious context in which this author places the homunculus, a miracle or magnale Dei, whose secret will only be revealed on the Day of Judgement.

⁴⁴See K. Sudhoff (ed.), Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke. I. Abteilung. Medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche und philosophische Schriften, 14 vols (Munich-Berlin, 1922–1933).

⁴⁵See, e.g., Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel, 1958); Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton. Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982). Yet the rehabilitation of Paracelsus as a precursor of the Scientific Revolution was achieved at the cost of denying the fundamental ambiguities in his work, his many debts to medieval sources, and the incoherence of his writing. For a valuable corrective, see Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus. Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany, NY, 1997), who shows the extent to which Paracelsus’ ideas concerning medicine (also alchemy, astrology, and what he called ‘anatomy’) derive from his religious world view. Practising ‘a text-centred historicism’ (xii), Weeks reconstructs the doctrinal and socio-political upheavals through which Paracelsus lived, and chronicles his intellectual career in terms of a ‘transferral of his religious speculations to nature and medicine’ (105), drawing especially on eschatology (73–75), logos mysticism (112, 178–79), the Pauline concept of love (140, 176), Mariology (79–83, 88–89), Trinitarian ideas (80–85, 118, 146–47, 149–51), and above all the divine image (111–28).

⁴⁷Paracelsus’ bones have been disturbed more than once. As Walther Auwe recorded, in a note not cited by Newman, ‘Über den Schädel des Paracelsus von Hohenheim’, Die Pharmazie 5 (1950), 614–15, they were removed from the graveyard of the St. Sebastianskirche, Salzburg, in the mid-eighteenth century, and placed in the church vestry, in a marble pyramid monument, behind locked doors. Interested visitors, however, especially doctors, could see them, and in 1819, the Hofrath Osiander was given permission to handle the skull and the bones. Examining them, he was struck by the delicacy of the bone structure and exclaimed that, ‘were he not convinced that these bones had not been exchanged for those of another skeleton, he would consider both the skull and the bones to be those of a woman’ (my translation). Osiander made further measurements of male and female skulls, strengthening his diagnosis, and felt it to be confirmed when he read accounts of Paracelsus’ life, according to which, when three years old, a pig bit off his genitals. So, Awe commented, just as animals castrated early in life develop feminine features, and castrati develop a woman's oval face and more delicate neck, it is not surprising that Paracelsus’ bone structure should have become female. And, according to a French historian of medicine, Paracelsus’ castration would account for his misogyny. At this point, the sceptical reader may enquire, are we sure that these are Paracelsus’ bones?

⁵¹Translated by C.B. Schmitt, in his John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, Canada, 1983), 212.

⁴⁸ Sylva Sylvarum, i.99, in Works, edited by J. Spedding et al., 14 vols (London, 1857–74), 2.382–83. See similar comments in Historia Densi et Rari, Works, 5.368–69. Once again, Newman hopes that his ulterior motives tactic will discredit alchemy's critics, claiming that Bacon was ‘back-peddling’ here, drawing back from an ‘overly close association with the chymists’, and ‘nervously extracting himself fromthe possible imputation of making a homunculus’ (263–64). But the experiments Bacon describes on wood and water are quite different, designed to see whether simple bodies can be turned into compound bodies by heating.

⁴⁹See Promethean Ambitions, 102–103, 250–55, 273–75, 281–82, 289, 300.

⁵⁰Sennert, De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu (1619), trans. Nicholas Culpeper and Abdial Cole as Chymistry Made Easie and Useful: Or, the Agreement and Disagreement of the Chymists and Galenists (London, 1662), 18. See also Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity’ (note 40), 126–49 on Paracelsus’ habitual collapse of analogy into identity and vigorous objections by Thomas Erastus, Francis Bacon, Daniel Sennert and J.B. van Helmont.

⁵²Reviewing Promethean Ambitions in Metascience 14 (2005), 289–92, Alisha Rankin judged ‘Newman's attempts to tie his presentation of the art–nature debate into current concerns about cloning’ as ‘unnecessary. Although it may aid the modern reader in conceptualising some of the issues that Newman discusses, the thread that ties Mediaeval and early modern philosophy to modern biomedical ethics is so thin that the comparison adds little to the book’ (291–92).

⁵³ Ambix, vol. 54, no. 2, July 2007, pp. 117–45.

⁵⁴ Promethean Ambitions, pp. 291–2.

⁵⁵ Promethean Ambitions, p. 258.

⁵⁶Peter Shaw, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon. Methodized, and made English..., 3 vols. (London, 1733), vol 1, pp. 564–5.