Jennifer M. Rampling

Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as "Practical Exegesis" in Early Modern England.

An influential strand of English alchemy was the pursuit of the “vegetable stone,” a medicinal elixir popularized by George Ripley (d. ca. 1490), made from a metallic substance, “sericon.” Yet the identity of sericon was not fixed, undergoing radical reinterpretation between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as Ripley’s lead-based practice was eclipsed by new methods, notably the antimonial approach of George Starkey (1628–65). Tracing “sericonian” alchemy over 250 years, I show how alchemists fed their practical findings back into textual accounts, creating a “feedback loop” in which the authority of past adepts was maintained by exegetical manipulations—a process that I term “practical exegesis.”

Depicting the Medieval Alchemical Cosmos: George Ripley’s Wheel of Inferior Astronomy

Alchemical images take many forms, from descriptive illustrations of apparatus to complex allegorical schemes that link practical operations to larger cosmological structures. I argue that George Ripley’s famous Compound of Alchemy (1471) was intended to be read in light of a circular figure appended to the work: the Wheel. In the concentric circles of his “lower Astronomy,” Ripley provided a terrestrial analogue for the planetary spheres: encoding his alchemical ingredients as planets that orbited the earthly elements at the core of the work. The figure alludes to a variety of late medieval alchemical doctrines. Yet the complexity of Ripley’s scheme sometimes frustrated later readers, whose struggles to decode and transcribe the figure left their mark in print and manuscript.

The Elizabethan mathematics of everything: John Dee's ‘Mathematicall praeface’ to Euclid's Elements

This article considers John Dees famous classification and justification of ‘the Sciences, and Artes Mathematicall’ in his Mathematicall praeface to Henry Billingsleys Elements of geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570), the first English translation of Euclid. It is a revised version of a lecture presented to the British Society for the History of Mathematics Autumn Meeting, October 2010, under the title ‘John Dee and the Elizabethan Mathematics of Everything’.

The Catalogue of the Ripley Corpus: Alchemical Writings Attributed to George Ripley (d. ca. 1490)

Abstract The period 1471 to 1700 saw the accretion of a large corpus of alchemical works associated with the famous English alchemist George Ripley, Canon of Bridlington (d. ca. 1490). Evaluation of Ripleys alchemy is hampered by uncertainty over the composition of the corpus, the dating and provenance of individual texts, and the difficulty of separating genuine from spurious attributions. The Catalogue of the Ripley Corpus (CRC) provides a first step in ordering these diverse materials: a descriptive catalogue of approximately forty-five alchemical treatises, recipes and poems attributed to Ripley, with an index of all known manuscript copies.

New Developments for Ambix

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Volume 60 of Ambix, the Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry. This issue represents a landmark both for the Society and for me. On the one hand, it marks the Journal’s move from three to four issues per year. This development reflects encouraging trends in the recent history of alchemy and chemistry, from growth in the number of younger scholars working on these topics, to the increasing number of high quality papers being offered to Ambix. The Society has played an active role in fostering these trends, by organising and sponsoring conferences and workshops, offering prizes and grants (particularly to students and early career scholars), and supporting the dissemination of the best international research. In this respect, the growth of Ambix reflects the expansion both of the Society’s activities and of scholarly interest in the history of alchemy and chemistry more generally. Our publisher, Maney, has also provided essential support for the venture, rising to the challenge of increasing the amount of journal content by a third each year, at rather less than a third more in cost. On the other hand, the issue is also my first as Editor of Ambix. The Journal provided an indispensable source of material during my own doctoral research, and it is an honour now to succeed Dr Peter J. T. Morris at the helm. With my appointment, Ambixmoves from the Science Museum, London, to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge: appropriately enough, to the University’s old physical chemistry laboratory on Free School Lane. In the future, Ambix will continue to publish scholarship of the highest quality from around the world. All articles are submitted for double-blind peer review, and our international Editorial Advisory Board provides expertise on historical periods ranging from antiquity to the present day. My own research focuses on the history of alchemy, while Peter Morris, a distinguished specialist in modern chemistry, stays on as Deputy Editor – ensuring that the editorial team represents both the ‘alchemy’ and the ‘chemistry’ in the Society’s name and remit. This balance remains a priority of the Journal: an objective assisted by the move to quarterly publication, which allows us to include two special or themed issues in each volume of Ambix. While the rationale for selecting material for special issues may be chronological, historiographical, or thematic, our intention is to provide, ambix, Vol. 60 No. 1, February 2013, 1–2

John Dee and the alchemists: Practising and promoting English alchemy in the Holy Roman Empire

This paper investigates John Dee’s relationship with two kinds of alchemist: the authorities whose works he read, and the contemporary practitioners with whom he exchanged texts and ideas. Both strands coincide in the reception of works attributed to the famous English alchemist, George Ripley (d. c. 1490). Dee’s keen interest in Ripley appears from the number of transcriptions he made of ‘Ripleian’ writings, including the Bosome book, a manuscript discovered in 1574 and believed to have been written in Ripley’s own hand. In 1583, Dee and his associate Edward Kelley left England for East Central Europe, taking with them a proportion of Dee’s vast library, including alchemical books—the contents of which would soon pique the interest of continental practitioners. Kelley used Ripley’s works, including the Bosome book, not only as sources of practical information, but as a means of furthering his own relationships with colleagues and patrons: transactions that in turn influenced Ripley’s posthumous continental reception. The resulting circulation of texts allows us to trace, with unusual precision, the spread of English alchemical ideas in the Holy Roman Empire from the late sixteenth century.

John Dee and the sciences: early modern networks of knowledge

The significance of John Dee (1527–1609) for historians of science rests both on the range of his interests and activities, and the problems this range has caused for his biographers. A mathematician learned in British history, cartography, astrology and navigation, throughout his life Dee also became increasingly engaged with alchemy, kabbalah, divination, and communion with spirits. All of these interests, and more, were represented in his library, one of the largest and most comprehensive in Europe, particularly for scientific content. The range of his pursuits was famously taxonomised in his account of ‘the Sciences, and Artes Mathematicall’ in the Mathematicall praeface to Henry Billingsley’s English translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570). Here, Dee’s ‘Groundplat’ of the sciences laid out the applications of geometry and arithmetic not only in the fields of mathematics and natural philosophy, but also in ‘thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine.’ Historiographically, Dee’s Protean interests have proved no easier to classify than his spectra of the mathematical arts. Dee’s esoteric pursuits were well known to his contemporary detractors, and continue to occupy the popular imagination today, yet the academy has struggled to reconcile his natural philosophical interests with those apparently antithetical to modern conceptions of science. In the absence of any single, outstanding contribution to support his inclusion in canonical histories of the Scientific Revolution, for much of the twentieth century Dee remained a marginal figure in broader histories of science. His re-engineering as a hermetic magus in the 1960s and 70s offered a new narrative, in which Dee became the case study par excellence for the influence of Neoplatonic currents on sixteenthand seventeenth-century developments in astronomy and natural philosophy. The synthetic studies of I. R. F. Calder (1952), Peter French (1972) and Frances Yates (1969, 1972, 1979), in emphasising Dee’s occult philosophical interests, thereby provided a sharp contrast with the internalist histories of

Transmission and Transmutation: George Ripley and the Place of English Alchemy in Early Modern Europe

Continental authors and editors often sought to ground alchemical writing within a long-established, coherent and pan-European tradition, appealing to the authority of adepts from different times and places. Greek, Latin and Islamic alchemists met both in person and between the covers of books, in actual, fictional or coincidental encounters: a trope utilised in Michael Maier’s Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (1617). This essay examines how works attributed to an English authority, George Ripley (d. c. 1490), were received in central Europe and incorporated into continental compendia. Placed alongside works by the philosophers of other nations, Ripley’s writings helped affirm the unity and truth of alchemy in defiance of its critics. His continental editors were therefore concerned not only with the provenance of manuscripts and high-quality exemplars, but by a range of other factors, including the desire to suppress controversial material, intervene in contemporary polemics, and defend their art. In the resulting compilations, the vertical axis of alchemy’s long, diachronic tradition may be compared to the horizontal plane of pan-European alchemy.