Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- 17 Natural Philosophy
- 18 Medicine
- 19 Natural History
- 20 Cosmography
- 21 From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
- 22 Magic
- 23 Astrology
- 24 Astronomy
- 25 Acoustics and Optics
- 26 Mechanics
- 27 The Mechanical Arts
- 28 Pure Mathematics
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
21 - From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
from Part III - Dividing the Study of Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- 17 Natural Philosophy
- 18 Medicine
- 19 Natural History
- 20 Cosmography
- 21 From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
- 22 Magic
- 23 Astrology
- 24 Astronomy
- 25 Acoustics and Optics
- 26 Mechanics
- 27 The Mechanical Arts
- 28 Pure Mathematics
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
Summary
Between the High Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline of alchemy underwent a succession of remarkable changes, both in its internal configuration and in its outward dispersion. In a word, alchemy moved from a rather marginal position as a discipline concerned mainly with mineralogy, metallurgy, and the products of chemical technology to the center of the European stage, where it became the basis for a comprehensive theory of matter and the justification of a heterodox new medicine, occupying the best minds of the age. All the same, alchemy retained a striking continuity between its medieval and early modern incarnations. Up to the beginning of the Enlightenment, the writers of the popular new genre of “chymical textbooks” were paying tribute to Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient and numinous figure who supposedly founded the art of alchemy (see Copenhaver, Chapter 22, this volume). Until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, these textbook authors made no strict demarcation between “alchemy” and “chemistry,” and despite a misconception popular among historians, they did not normally disavow the transmutation of metals.
The modern distinction between alchemy and chemistry, wherein the former refers exclusively to the transmutation of base metals into gold, is a caricature popularized above all by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. In the Middle Ages, alchemy was commonly viewed as a subordinate and artisanal branch of physics, a sort of “applied science” based on general principles supplied by natural philosophy. It was classed within the field of “meteorology,” that is, the study of matter below the sphere of the moon.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 497 - 517Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
References
, Super Boetium de trinitate, in Sancti Thomae de Aquino opera omnia, Leonine edition (Rome: Commissio Leonina, 1992).Google Scholar
, Ioannis Aurelii Augurelli P. Ariminensis chrysopoeiae libri III (Basel: Johann Froben, 1518).Google Scholar
, Johannes’ de Rupescissa Liber de consideratione quintae essentiae omnium rerum deutsch (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1989).Google Scholar
, Margarita pretiosa, in Theatrum chemicum, ed. , vol. 5 (Strasbourg: Eberhard Zetzner, 1660)Google Scholar
, “Thomas Erastus and His Circle of Anti-Paracelsians,” in Analecta paracelsica, ed. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994)Google Scholar
, “Berg-, Probir- und Kunstbüchlein,” in Münchener Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur der Naturwissenschaften und Medizin, 2/3 (1926).Google Scholar
, Liber de priscorum philosophorum verae medicinae materia… (Geneva: Haeredes Eustathii Vignon, 1603).Google Scholar
, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Rudolph II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)Google Scholar
, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. and (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989)Google Scholar
, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar
, “John Mayow and the Aerial Nitre,” Actes du VIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences (Paris: Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, 1953)Google Scholar
Alchymia ratione et experientia ita demum viriliter impugnata… (Strasbourg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1603).Google Scholar
, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
, “La controverse sur les origines de la chimie, de Paracelse à Borrichius,” in Acta Conventus Neo-latini Turonensis, Troisième Congrès International d’Études Neo-latines, ed. , 2 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1980), 2.Google Scholar
, “Les ouvrages alchimiques de Jean de Rupescissa, Jean de Roquetaillade,” in Histoire littéraire de la France, vol. 41 (Paris, 1981).Google Scholar
, “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe,” Isis, 77 (1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
, “The Invention of Printing and the Diffusion of Alchemical and Chemical Knowledge,” Chymia, 3 (1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
“Mittelalterliche Konzepte in der Medizin des Paracelsus,” in Paracelsus – Das Werk – Die Rezeption, ed. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995).Google Scholar
, Jābir ibn Hayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1942)Google Scholar
, Commentariorum alchymiae… pars prima, in , Alchymia (Frankfurt: Joannes Saurius, 1606).Google Scholar
, Defensio et declaratio perspicua alchymiae transmutatoriae… (St.-Ursel: Petrus Kopffius, 1604).Google Scholar
, “L’interprétation alchimique de la mythologie,” Dix-huitième siècle, 27 (1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Artibus academicis inserenda: Chemistry’s Place in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Universities,” History of Universities, 7 (1988).Google Scholar
, Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1923).Google Scholar
, “Medieval Distilling-Apparatus of Glass and Pottery,” Medieval Archaeology, 16 (1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Chemical Pharmacy Enters the University (Madison, Wis.: American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, 1991).Google Scholar
, The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen, 1572–1632 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991).Google ScholarPubMed
and , “Alchemy versus Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Alchemical and Baconian Views on the Art/Nature Division,” in Reading the Book of Nature, ed. and (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998).Google Scholar
, “Art, Nature, and Experiment among Some Aristotelian Alchemists,” in Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science, ed. and (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).Google Scholar
, “The Alchemical Sources of Robert Boyle’s Corpuscular Philosophy,” Annals of Science, 53 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Background to Newton’s Chymistry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
, “The Philosophers’ Egg: Theory and Practice in the Alchemy of Roger Bacon,” Micrologus, 3 (1995).Google Scholar
, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Alchemical Symbolism and Concealment: The Chemical House of Libavius,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. and (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).Google Scholar
, “Alchemy, Domination, and Gender,” in A House Built on Sand, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
, “Corpuscular Alchemy and the Tradition of Aristotle’s Meteorology, with Special Reference to Daniel Sennert,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 15 (2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Experimental Corpuscular Theory in Aristotelian Alchemy: From Geber to Sennert,” in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theory, ed. , , and (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001).Google Scholar
, “Practical Alchemy and Commercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. and (New York: Routledge, 2002).Google Scholar
, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: Karger, 1958).Google Scholar
, Liber meteororum, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. , ser. 1, 14 vols. (Munich: Barth, Oldenbourg, 1922–33), 13Google Scholar
and , Il “Testamentum” alchemico attribuito a Raimondo Lullo (Tavarnuzze: SISMEL, 1999).Google Scholar
and , “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. and (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).Google Scholar
, “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy,” in Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, ed. and (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).Google Scholar
, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
, “Boyle’s Alchemical Pursuits,” in Robert Boyle Reconsidered, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, “Un atelier de distillation du moyen âge,” Bulletin archéologique du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, n.s. 22 (1989).Google Scholar
, De chymicorum cum aristotelicis et galenicis consensu ac dissensu… (Wittenberg: Zacharias Schurer, 1619).Google Scholar
, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, Fundamenta chymiae dogmaticorationalis experimentalis (Nuremberg: Wolfgang: Mauritii Endteri Filiae, 1732), pt. 1Google Scholar
, Philosophical Principles of Universal Chemistry…, trans. (London: Osborn and Longman, 1730).Google Scholar
, Bibliographia Paracelsica (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1898; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck, 1958).Google Scholar
, “Johann Huser in seinen Briefen,” in Parerga Paracelsica (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991).Google Scholar
, “Kurfürst Ottheinrich, Hans Kilian und Paracelsus: Zum pfälzischen Paracelsismus im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Von Paracelsus zu Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt (Salzburger Beiträge zur Paracelsus Forschung, 22) (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Oesterreichs, 1981).Google Scholar
, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 5.Google Scholar
, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 5 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941)Google Scholar
, Mass, Zahl und Gewicht in der Chemie der Vergangenheit, in Sammlung chemischer und chemisch-technischer Vorträge begründet von F. B. Ahrens, ed. (Neue Folge, Heft 8) (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1931)Google Scholar
- 11
- Cited by