Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire

Tara Nummedal

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780226608570
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe's social and economic ills.Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, Tara Nummedal shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the "real" alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.

CHAPTER ONE

Assembling Expertise

How did one become an alchemist in early modern Europe? One might imagine joining the ranks of the adepts to be quite difficult. After all, as one mid-sixteenth-century alchemist put it, “alchemy is well hidden because the old masters who found the art did not want to teach [it to] either their children or their friends; therefore, he who finds this art is lucky, because it is not easily found.”¹ Alchemical texts repeatedly described alchemy as a buried treasure, “the great gemstone and most noble pearl,”² and authors warned that the alchemist “should be secretive and silent and should reveal his secret to no one.”³ Alchemy, it seemed, was shrouded in secrecy, available only to the lucky treasure hunter or to one worthy to receive a revelation. Complicating matters further, alchemy also fell between the two institutions that traditionally oversaw the transfer of knowledge and expertise in early modern Europe: guilds and universities. Towns did not organize alchemists into guilds as they did members of other professions, such as surgeons, butchers, or tailors, suggesting that alchemy was not quite a craft trade. If interested and hopeful adepts could not sign up for guild apprentisceships, neither could they enroll at a university to access alchemical secrets. Perhaps suspicious of alchemy’s status as a manual art, or perhaps more deeply skeptical about the philosophical status of alchemists’ claims to surpass nature, the medieval founders of European universities had not integrated alchemy formally into the scholastic curriculum.⁴ What was an aspiring alchemist to do?

Despite this lack of obvious venues for alchemical training in the sixteenth century, the number of men and even women who claimed to be practitioners suggests that the secretive and decentralized art was much more accessible than it would appear. Commenting in 1617 on the ease with which individuals turned themselves into alchemists, one rather cynical observer noted: “Look, and you will find [the alchemist’s] primary transmutation to be of himself: a goldsmith becomes a goldmaker, an apothecary a chemical physician, a barber a Paracelsian, one who wastes his own patrimony turns into one who spends the gold and goods of others.”⁵ Indeed, the range of people engaged in the alchemical arts in central Europe was astounding. Not only natural philosophers and Paracelsian physicians, but also court ladies, pastors, apothecaries, Jews, and even “a maiden from Frankfort” studied alchemy and plied their art, if only to varying degrees of success.⁶ Hardly the preserve of a few chosen adepts alone, alchemy was clearly accessible to a large section of the populace in the sixteenth century.

Where, then, did all of these alchemists acquire their skills and knowledge? This chapter explores the many different resources available to aspiring alchemists in the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As we might expect, some practitioners gained alchemical expertise by reading all or part of the vast corpus of treatises on the subject. Books were not the only resource, however. Overlapping fields such as metallurgy and medicine provided an invaluable source for essential skills and tools, as did the expertise of fellow practitioners of the alchemical arts. Although some alchemists argued that certain of these paths to alchemical wisdom were more legitimate than others, practitioners lacked the institutional authority to enforce those norms. Precisely because there was no alchemical guild or college to regulate practice and licensing, or an alchemy faculty at the universities to prescribe an authoritative curriculum, no single method of alchemical training prevailed. This lack of consensus opened the door to an unusually varied group of aspirants drawn from many segments of society; it also increasingly created battles over alchemical authority as the sixteenth century neared its end.

Alchemical Books and Their Renaissance Readers

In Au gust 1573, when Philipp Sömmering advised Duke Julius how to pursue his interest in alchemy, the alchemist cautioned, “Such a philosophical secret should be learned and acquired not from the fraudulent processes of vagabonds [landstreicher betrüglichen processen], but rather from the most trustworthy books of the philosophers.”⁷ Although some natural philosophers, physicians, and other medical practitioners were increasingly looking beyond the written word and observing nature directly in the sixteenth century, texts were still a primary locus of natural knowledge. Immersed in this world, Sömmering thus counseled his patron that “the first step in coming to the proper understanding of the secret [of alchemy] is to get good, first-rate books.”⁸ But which books? By mid century, literate students of alchemy were faced with a bewildering variety of texts. Manuscripts circulated widely, and modern print editions of ancient alchemical writings joined editions of medieval Latin and translated Arabic authors in the booksellers’ shops. At the same time, new genres and texts flooded the market as practical Kunstbüchlein (or skills books) and the works of Paracelsus and his followers appeared in the bookstalls. Where should the would-be alchemist begin to read?

In order to guide his patron through this voluminous alchemical corpus, Sömmering provided Julius with a reading list that highlighted the importance of medieval Latin texts. Sömmering urged his patron to begin with the Catalan physician, religious reformer, and diplomat Arnald of Villanova (ca. 1240–1311), in whose name alchemical texts such as the Rosarium philosophorum appeared in the fourteenth century, because he offered a good foundation in both alchemical theory and practice.⁹ According to Sömmering, the medieval physician explained the generation of metals and minerals in the earth and “describes splendidly” the basic components of all metals, mercury and sulfur; Arnald (or rather pseudo-Arnald, for it is unlikely that he wrote the texts that appeared in his name) also offered practical explanations of the “philosophical fire” and how to multiply metals by means of art (künstlich). “After that, read Roger Bacon [ca. 1215–after 1292] and Bernhard [of Treviso, fl. 1378],” Sömmering continued; “thus the philosophical fire will be thoroughly explained.” Although Sömmering promised that Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–74) would “bring great understanding,” he especially praised Bernhard as a font of knowledge about mercury, confessing that Bernhard’s description of the “treasure of the secret,” presumably the process for making the philosophers’ stone, was his favorite book.¹⁰ Finally, in addition to several other books that are now difficult to identify, Sömmering also included in his list an unpublished vernacular treatise by the fifteenth-century Bamberger Cathedral vicar and notary Johann Sternhals.¹¹ This treatise, entitled Ritter Krieg (War of the knights), was a “philosophical poem” in which gold (Sol) and iron (Mars) each argued their virtues (and slandered each other) in a court, with quicksilver (Merkurio) presiding as judge.¹²

Although Sömmering’s list is perhaps an idiosyncratic slice of the alchemical corpus available to sixteenth-century readers, it nonetheless highlights the importance of a medieval Latin alchemical textual tradition that extended back to the late twelfth century. Alchemists, like Renaissance natural philosophers in general, had by no means embraced the idea yet that modern knowledge was superior to ancient; to the contrary, they tended to look to the past for authoritative knowledge.¹³ Among alchemists this was particularly true because of a firm belief that ancient sages (die alten Weisen) had successfully created the philosophers’ stone and that their wisdom had been preserved in the alchemical corpus. Thus, as repositories of an ancient wisdom that had wended its way over the course of a millennium from Hellenistic Egypt to Europe via medieval Spain and Baghdad, medieval Latin texts were an important resource for early modern alchemists.¹⁴

More than just conveying ancient knowledge, however, medieval authors also made their own contributions to the alchemical tradition. Natural philosophers writing in Arabic, such as Jābir ibn Hayyān (known in Europe as Geber, fl. 9th–10th c.) and Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī (or Rhazes, ca. 854–925 or 935), digested and elaborated on Greek alchemical theory. In the process, they developed some of alchemy’s central tenets, such as the idea that all metals are made of sulfur and mercury.¹⁵ Following increased contact with the Muslim world, twelfth-century scholars in Europe began to translate Arabic natural philosophical and alchemical texts into Latin. These translations introduced Europeans to alchemy for the first time, and, in response, Latin scholars began to absorb, rework, and develop the vibrant medieval Arabic alchemical tradition.¹⁶ Disagreement about the possibility of metallic transmutation and the limits of human technology took center stage in what William Newman has described as the “alchemical debate of the late Middle Ages.”¹⁷ As supporters of the alchemical arts such as the philosophers Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and pseudo-Geber defended their art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they produced a number of influential texts dealing with alchemy’s theoretical and practical elements. Alchemy’s proponents ultimately failed fully to establish the art’s legitimacy in the face of growing ecclesiastical and philosophical criticism during this period; nevertheless, these debates established a Latin textual tradition, a European alchemical corpus that continued to be influential into the seventeenth century.¹⁸

Alongside this Latin scholastic debate about alchemy’s legitimacy, vernacular late medieval alchemical literature flourished as well. As Michela Pereira has noted, the very fact that the alchemical tradition “implied linguistic transfers from the beginning”—that is, that so many alchemical texts had already been translated from Greek into Arabic and then into Latin—made alchemists especially “likely candidates to use the vernacular in writing”; the notion of presenting alchemical ideas in a variety of languages, in other words, was deeply familiar. Moreover, alchemy had always operated in what Pereira calls a “double-regimen,” oral and written, “that characterized alchemy in its dissoluble mingling of practice and theory.” This double regimen ensured that the Latin and vernacular operated side by side in laboratory operations; practitioners who simultaneously read texts in Latin and spoke to each other in the vernacular might use both languages in books as well.¹⁹ For all of these reasons, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries alchemical texts began to appear in French, Italian, Catalan, Czech, and English and in a wide range of genres, including recipes, poems, images, and prose treatises. Some were translations of Latin or Arabic texts, as was the German version of John of Rupescissa’s book on the quintessence (ca. 1440), but other texts were originally written in the vernacular.²⁰ The German language alchemical tradition seems to have begun around 1415–19 with the Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (Book of the Sacred Trinity), which likened the process of creating the philosophers’ stone to the death and resurrection of Christ.²¹ Another German alchemical treatise appeared in 1426 as Alchymey teuczsch, which preserves the alchemical activities of four Bavarians, Niklas Jankowitz, Michael von Prapach, Michael Wülfling, and one Friedrich. Most famously, the illustrated alchemical poem Sol und Luna appeared in the late fifteenth century.²² These texts emphasized an experimental alchemical tradition outside the universities and paved the way for the explosion of vernacular texts in the sixteenth century.

Whether Latin or vernacular, this medieval alchemical corpus was becoming increasingly available to sixteenth-century Europeans. Texts certainly continued to circulate in manuscript even a century after the invention of the printing press; indeed, until the middle of the sixteenth century, it is likely that most alchemical texts remained in manuscript form (and this is especially true if one takes into account recipe books).²³ When Sömmering recommended Sternhals’s Ritter Krieg to Julius, for example, he could only have had a manuscript in mind, since this fifteenth-century text would not be available in print for another two decades. Nevertheless, from the middle of the sixteenth century onw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Early Modern Weights and Measures
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Assembling Expertise
• 2. The Alchemist’s Personae
• 3. Entrepreneurial Alchemy
• 4. Contracting the Philosophers’ Stone
• 5. Laboratories, Space, and Secrecy
• 6. Betrüger on Trial
• Conclusion: The Problem of Authority
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index