Lawrence M. Principe

Alchemical laboratory notebooks and correspondence

George Starkey - chymistry tutor to Robert Boyle, author of immensely popular alchemical treatises, and probably early Americas most important scientist - reveals through these pages the daily experimentation of a seventeenth-century alchemist. The editors present in this volume transcriptions of Starkeys texts, their translations, and valuable commentary for the modern reader. Dispelling the myth that alchemy was an irrational enterprise, this remarkable collection reveals the otherwise hidden methodologies of one of the seventeenth centurys most influential alchemists.

The Lost Papers of Robert Boyle

Although the volume of the surviving papers of Robert Boyle is substantial (over 20,000 leaves), a considerable amount of the written material left by Boyle at his death in 1691 has not survived in the Boyle archive. This paper gauges the scale and identity of these losses using the surviving inventories made by the Rev. Henry Miles in the 1740s when he was collecting and sorting Boyles literary remains in conjunction with Thomas Birchs preparation of his 1744 Life and Works of Boyle. These detailed lists (edited as appendices to this paper), together with other sources, indicate losses due to a variety of reasons, some deliberate, others accidental. The losses involved the disposal of both items judged (in the eighteenth century) to be peripheral to Boyles archive and, ironically, those in the most finished state from Boyles hand, which were perhaps abortively destined for the Birch edition. These losses have significantly altered the character of the Boyle Papers, and thus the view of Boyle that is derived from them.

From the Library to the Laboratory and Back Again: Experiment as a Tool for Historians of Science

From the Library to the Laboratory and Back Again : Experiment as a Tool for Historians of Science

Sir Kenelm Digby and His Alchemical Circle in 1650s Paris: Newly Discovered Manuscripts

Abstract A significant cache of hitherto unidentified manuscripts of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) has been discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg. These manuscripts comprise over 5000 pages of material. The documents relate almost entirely to metallic transmutation. About half of the material consists of alchemical treatises (most of them unpublished) by earlier authors — many relate to the transmuter Noël Picard, known as Dubois, executed in 1637 — and show Digbys careful comparison of variant readings in order to obtain the best text. The other half contains transcripts from the otherwise lost notebooks of Joseph Du Chesne, Samuel Cottereau Duclos (including several letters from Johann Rudolf Glauber), and others, as well as reports of experiments and processes carried out by a range of informants and by Digby himself. Significantly, these manuscripts bear witness to an important alchemical circle — of which Digby was a part — active in Paris during the 1650s and 1660s. The members of this circle traded manuscripts and information, and collaborated on a variety of alchemical projects; several members were also involved in other, better-known, scientific groupings of mid-century Paris.

Alchemy and the Changing Significance of Analysis

It is hardly necessary to emphasize the fact that alchemy has long held a privileged position in the popular mind as the epitome of “wrong” andmisguided science.Whether viewed as the product of an ignorant and clownish empiricism, the embodiment of dishonest greed, or the vehicle of attempts to attain a mystical union with divinity, alchemy has only rarely received praise for its scientific content. Until quite recently, the subject much more commonly served moderns as an object of ridicule. The seeds of this usage were already planted in the Middle Ages themselves, when such hapless alchemists as Dante’s Griffolino d’Arezzo and Capocchio da Siena were consigned to the rigors of the Inferno and Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman to the infernal duplicity of alchemical charlatans. Later historians have, more often than not, drawn upon such negative images of alchemy and its practitioners for a foil against which more “progressive” historical developments could be made to stand in higher relief. This is a historiographical motif that extends back through Charles Mackay’s famousMemoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and theMadness of Crowds to the Enlightenment in one direction, and forward to Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump in the other.1 On the other hand, there have also been some historians of chemistry and chemists who have themselves maintained that alchemy was a fruitful ancestor of their subject. One thinks immediately of Justus Liebig, Hermann Kopp, Marcelin Berthelot, and J. R. Partington, who were all significant chemists as well as participants in the historiography of chemistry.2 But here too a problem emerges, in that such authors have tended to extract what they viewed as chemically significant from its historical context, and to ignore the vast reams of text that contained no material of obvious relevance to their views on the development of chemistry. Any attempt to isolate what was scientifically “right” about alchemywill run full force into the same problem – the positivist tendency to extract precious nuggets of fact while ignoring such problems as historical context, the role of theory in its interaction with practice, and the overall purpose of the works in question. Nonetheless, the historian of this subject must confront a stark and ineluctable choice between adopting the picture of alchemy as folly that derives from the tradition already begun byDante andChaucer and passed on by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his heirs among the Netherlandish genre painters, or arguing that the field contributed something to the science and technology of its time.3 Since the default picture of alchemy in the mind of most scientists, philosophers, and general historians as well belongs more to the first category than the second, a strategy of silence entails a tacit capitulation to the received view.

The End of Alchemy

The general abandonment of serious endeavor toward metallic transmutation represents a major development in the history of chemistry, yet its exact causes and timing remain unclear. This essay examines the fate of chrysopoeia at the eighteenth-century Académie Royale des Sciences. It reveals a long-standing tension between Académie chemists, who pursued transmutation, and administrators, who tried to suppress it. This tension provides background for Etienne-François Geoffroy’s 1722 paper describing fraudulent practices around transmutation. Although transmutation seems to disappear after Geoffroy’s paper, manuscripts reveal that most of the institution’s chemists continued to pursue it privately until at least the 1760s, long after widely accepted dates for the “demise of alchemy” in learned circles.

Georges Pierre Des Clozets, Robert Boyle, the Alchemical Patriarch of Antioch, And the Reunion of Christendom: Further New Sources

In 1677, Georges Pierre des Clozets visited Robert Boyle and told him that he had been approved for membership in the Asterism, a secret international society of alchemical masters, headed by Pierres patron Georges du Mesnillet, the Patriarch of Antioch. Extensive correspondence followed, replete with gifts and bizarre claims, until Pierre vanished in August 1678. This paper links several new documents—articles in the Mercure galant and the Gazette de France and a manuscript account by another convinced admirer of Pierre—to my previous study of him, particularly in regard to Pierres claim to be working with the Patriarch to reunite Eastern and Western Churches. Dating from before and after Boyles involvement, these sources add fresh details about Pierre and his other contacts, and show the consistency of Pierres stories and the credibility he fashioned as he travelled around Europe convincing people of his claims alchemical and otherwise.

Jacob Boehme's Divine Substance Salitter: its Nature, Origin, and Relationship to Seventeenth Century Scientific Theories

The Century between the death of Copernicus (1543) and the birth of Newton (1642) witnessed a major reshaping of traditional ways of viewing the universe. The Ptolemaic system was challenged by Copernican heliocentrism, the Aristotelian world was assailed by Galilean physics and revived atomism, and theology was troubled by the progressive distancing of God from the daily operation of His creation. Besides earning this era the title of ‘the Scientific Revolution’, the intellectual ferment of these times offered many world systems as successors to the throne of crumbling Aristotelianism.

John Locke and the case of Anthony Ashley Cooper.

In June 1668 Anthony Ashley Cooper, later to become the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, underwent abdominal surgery to drain a large abscess above his liver. The case is extraordinary, not simply on account of the eminence of the patient and the danger of the procedure, but also because of the many celebrated figures involved. A trove of manuscripts relating to this famous operation survives amongst the Shaftesbury Papers in the National Archives at Kew. These include case notes in the hand of the philosopher John Locke and advice from leading physicians of the day including Francis Glisson, Sir George Ent and Thomas Sydenham. The majority of this material has never been published before. This article provides complete transcriptions and translations of all of these manuscripts, thus providing for the first time a comprehensive case history. It is prefaced with an extended introduction.

Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627-91).

very informative guide to the interpretation of alchemical symbols and images on the one hand, and to the tracing of alchemical themes in modern and contemporary artworks, on the other. The volume is concluded with a brief glossary of alchemical terminology, and a list for further reading. Although both these sections are not particularly comprehensive and could easily be expanded, they are nevertheless useful tools for the reader who is approaching alchemy and its historical developments for the first time and may be curious to explore the subject further. The edited book is an excellent contribution to the study of the multiform relationship between art and alchemy, and will undoubtedly prove to be a fruitful reading for a variety of audiences. The textual historian of alchemy will be presented with a wonderful set of images and their thorough interpretation; the historian of art will find an academically sound narrative of the origins and developments of alchemy, and the symbols and images that deeply influenced artists from the middle ages to present times; and the non-specialised reader will be provided with a precise and yet approachable and highly enjoyable entry to the intriguing world of alchemy and its artistic connections.