Dietterlin’s Architectura prints and the processes he used to form them engaged with sixteenth-century Central Europe’s robust culture of alchemy to transform the architectural image into a context of scientific inquiry. Formal and iconographic analyses of architectural etchings by Dietterlin, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Hans Vredeman de Vries, in conversation with texts by alchemists Agrippa of Nettesheim and Paracelsus, reveal how architectural image-makers used etching’s mercurial, shapeshifting forms and the protean materiality of ornament not only to picture but also to activate alchemical theories and principles of empirical investigation. Dietterlin’s Architectura prints channelled etching’s alchemical dimensions, comparing the material and chemical transformations involved in architectural etching with the processes of transmutation studied in contemporary alchemical research. As is evident from the alchemical imagery that Dietterlin’s Architectura contributed to the court art of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, the Architectura established architectural images as contexts of alchemical thinking in the years around 1600. In sum, the transformative structures of Dietterlin’s architectural etchings allowed architectural prints to become fora for natural philosophical inquiry.

Chapter 3 focuses on Augustine’s early consideration of the resurrection as the transmutation of human flesh into an angelic body. In pondering Christ’s bodily ascension into heaven, Augustine experiments with the substantial transmutation of flesh and blood into an angelic, celestial, and ethereal body. As an attempt to handle our advancement in and through our beatific resurrection, Augustine’s experiment allows him to defend the bodily resurrection against the philosophical objections of unbelievers, who claim that earthly bodies cannot exist in heaven, and the exegetical objections of the Manichaeans, who insist that the substance of flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God (1 Cor 15:50). What permits this experiment, however, is Augustine’s conviction that the continuity and integrity of our human identity, both personal and communal, are grounded and crowned by the God of the resurrection. Augustine’s later precisions of his early concept of angelic transmutation manifest its insufficiencies.

Chapter 7 examines Benjamin Worsley’s manifesto of natural sciences that contained utopian ideas about human capacity to overcome death, if only the right scientific approach and the right moral attitude could be achieved. Revelation substituted what Boyle believed was the impossibility of grasping moral natural law rationally. Therefore, the study of moral natural laws is practically irrelevant in his work. Boyle moved constantly between a self-sufficient and mechanistic idea of the physical world and recourse to an infinitely wise God as a guide to human knowledge. He wrote several ambitious works on these issues, which are nowadays considered foundational to the Scientific Revolution but remain practically unknown beyond specialist circles nowadays. The chapter looks in particular at The Origine of Formes and Qualities and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature. These works articulate Boyle’s ambition to transmute everything in nature and his momentous critique of nature, a metaphysical and sacred concept that had been part of Western culture since at least the era of the great Greek philosophers.

The distinctiveness of their eyes has played a major role in debates about snake origins and early evolution, having been interpreted as providing evidence for nocturnal and/or fossorial (and to a lesser degree, aquatic) origins. Much of this evidence came from anatomical studies of snake retinas in the 1900s. More recent morphological and molecular studies have provided further evidence for the distinctness of the snake eye that lacks many of the traits present in lizards. Data remain patchy and are particularly sparse for extant lineages (scolecophidians and non-caenophidian alethinophidians) that bear special importance for inferring traits of the ancestral snake. However, evidence is strong for: (1) the ancestral snake having lost multiple anatomical and molecular genetic components present in the eyes of the ancestral squamate and retained by most lizards; (2) the eye of the ancestral snake being adapted for low-light environments and/or activity cycles but being notably less regressed than that of extant scolecophidians; (3) an elaboration and diversification of the eye within endoglyptodont caenophidian snakes.