Essay review

Alchemical artisans, artisanal alchemy

Robert Ralley
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane,
Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK
Distilling knowledge: Alchemy, chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution
Bruce T. Moran; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London, 2005, pp. 210,
Price 16.95 US$24.95 hardback, ISBN 0-674-01495-2.
John French, doctor of medicine, writer and translator, explained to his readers how to
learn alchemy. Think before proceeding, he warned: enter not upon the practicke till thou
art rst well versed in the theory, for it is much better to learn with thy braines, and imag-
ination, then with thy hands, and costs. Diligently read the sayings of true Philosophers,
read them over again and again, and meditate on them . . . Compare their sayings with the
possibility of Nature, and obscure places with cleare. Lastly, if at all possible:
acquaint thy self throughly with some true Philosophers . . . A faithfull well experi-
enced master will teach thee more in the mysteries of Alchymy in a quarter of a year,
then by thine owne studies and chargeable operations thou shalt learn in seven
yeares. In the rst place therefore, and above all things apply thy selfe to an expert,
faithfull, and communicative Artist, and account it a great gain, if thou canst pur-
chase his favour, though with a good gratuity, to lead thee through the manuall prac-
tice at the chiefest, and choisest preparations.
1
Robert Boyle knew the importance of personal instruction, and expended signicant ener-
gies soliciting reports from and interviews with practitioners.
2
He was trained in the art by
the visiting American George Starkey, who in turn had been taught in Massachusetts by a
0039-3681/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2006.03.004
E-mail address: rcr23@cam.ac.uk (R. Ralley).
1
French (1653), sig. B3[r][B3v].
2
Principe (2000), pp. 205207.
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Studies in History
and Philosophy
of Science
physician called Richard Palgrave.
3
Philosophical nous was not enough: training and
skilled support in chemical manipulation were an essential basis for alchemical
achievement.
According to Bruce T. Morans new textbook, acknowledging the artisanal quality of
alchemical pursuits is important for understanding their role in the establishment of the
new philosophy. Distilling knowledge describes the fate of alchemy during the early modern
period, tracing its path as it found favour with princes and experimental philosophers, and
as successive reformers shaped it both as a university discipline and as an alternative to
scholastic learning. Moran discusses these issues in terms of the Scientic Revolution;
but this is not, as the reader is taken to have assumed, about the triumph of human reason
over mysticism, magic, and the occult, in which the brotherhood of reason nally dispelled
the orcs of intellectual darkness (p. 4). Instead, the picture we should entertain is of an
animated muddle of belief, disillusion, and reinterpretation as people work out what there
is to talk about in the structure of nature, and how to learn more about it (p. 7). In this
confusion, practical procedures and the varied attempts to interpret them play a particu-
larly important role: this is how we should understand alchemys place in the story.
The remarks placed on the back cover proclaim the book to be unique, and rightly so:
as a textbook introduction to early modern alchemy it is literally matchless. It lls a sub-
stantial (and rather surprising) gap in the introductory literature for this period.
4
For
those primarily concerned with the developments in natural philosophy during the seven-
teenth century, it holds the attraction of contextualising with admirable clarity the more
mysterious activities of such luminaries as Boyle and Newton; for those interested chiey
in the history of alchemy itself, it presents a synthesis (one is inclined to say distillation) of
several years of renewed scholarly industry in the area. For the teacher of a course on this
topic, there is no other comparable resource.
One of the most perplexing things about alchemy is its sheer diversity: even the question
What was it? can prompt confusing and inconclusive responses. Having briey set out his
historiographical stall, Moran begins with a discussion of the existing alchemical tradi-
tions inherited by early modern practitioners. In treatises by the medieval Franciscans
John of Rupescissa and Roger Bacon, and some attributed to Ramon Lull, readers found
injunctions to extract, by means of distillation, fth essences from various substances,
from metals to alcohol to human blood. Such a product would be pure, an elixir that
would help prolong life. They also described a Philosophers Stone, a substance that
increased purity and could be used to transmute metals. The possibilities aorded by this
proved as alluring to European rulers as they were worrying to the Church; but alchemy
also remained the subject of much theoretical speculation. Petrus Bonus, a fourteenth-cen-
tury physician, tried to show that as a branch of knowledge alchemy had a place in the
Aristotelian hierarchy of scientiae but denied any manual involvement in the art.
Notwithstanding Bonuss remarks, Moran argues, the bulk of alchemical activity in this
period was practical: by artisans in workshops or even in the home. Leonardo da Vinci
and Vanoccio Biringuccio, master craftsmen and papal clients, sneered at the suggestion
that gold could be fabricated but praised the capabilities of alchemists in dealing with met-
als, dyes and medicines. Those who claimed to have found the elixir of life, Biringuccio
3
See Newman (1994), pp. 4850; Newman & Principe (2002), p. 157 and pp. 208222.
4
Existing textbooks are of much broader scope and in any case typically reect historiographical preferences
now out of favour: see for example Holmyard (1957), Read (1957) and Taylor (1951).
R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352 345
noted, were no less dead; but alchemy was the origin and foundation of many other arts,
and was to be revered and practised for the ne fruits of its eects and the knowledge of
them as well as the pleasing novelty it showed to the practitioner (p. 42). Moran outlines
a rise in literacy among artisans in the Renaissance and uses this to justify taking such
works as George Agricolas De re metallica (Basel, 1556) as expressive of artisanal culture.
Vernacular works on craft and household alchemy, outlining chemical processes and
medical recipes, were part of this popular publishing milieu (p. 47); books of secrets held
a special fascination. Most intriguingly, books by and for women, as well as household
manuals, located distillation strictly within the inner household province of the wife,
not the outer household of the husband.
Alchemys craft traditions and theoretical speculations were recongured by Paracel-
sus. Theophrast von Hohenheim, whose soubriquet was a claim to medical superiority
over the healers of classical antiquity, established a cosmology that blended magic
and alchemy within a Christian framework, and demanded the overturning of scholas-
ticism. Illness was a result of spiritual imperfection, inherited by humans after the Fall,
and it manifested itself by the failure of natural alchemical processes within the body.
The best healers produced their remedies by emulating in the laboratory the processes
that had gone wrong. The good healer knew that matter was a combination of three
principles, Sulphur, Salt and Mercury, and could tell which predominated in a particular
disease; could read the signatures in nature that disclosed the medicinal uses of objects
and substances; and above all, relied on experience rather than moribund book-learning.
Paracelsuss doctrines were attractive to outsiders critical of the medical establishment,
and for that reason if no other the label Paracelsian gained currency as a term of deri-
sion; but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chemical remedies were increas-
ingly accepted even within the Galenic system, propounded not only by adherents to
Paracelsuss vision, but also by followers of Jean Baptiste van Helmonts water-based,
vitalist adaptation.
German physician and schoolmaster Andreas Libavius bemoaned the inuence of
moderns such as Paracelsus who substituted their chance discoveries for the wisdom
of past authors and destroyed all consensus about the real art of chemical manipula-
tion. As Moran points out, the battle in which Libavius was engaged was as much
about institutional legitimisation as it was about philosophy. Paracelsians were rmly
ensconced in courts across Europe, though Moran suggests that such sites conveyed
no intellectual legitimacy for re-evaluating past experiences and establishing the essen-
tial meaning of chemistry (p. 103). Instead, Libavius turned to the universities, rework-
ing chemistry as a more philosophical activity, to suit the demands of scholastic
curricula and cultures. There too, however, Paracelsianism gained a foothold: Johannes
Hartmann was installed at Marburg in 1609 by Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, and con-
structed a public chemico-medical laboratory within which he taught processes includ-
ing by 16151616 some recipes outlined in Oswald Crolls Royal chemistry, printed that
year (p. 111). In various guises the subject was entering the universities. Part of its
redenition involved the sidelining, and sometimes stigmatisation, of alchemists: Nich-
olas Lemery, royal apothecary, wrote in A course of chemistry (Paris, 1675) that they
were frauds interested only in gold. Johannes Bohn, in his Chemicalphysical disserta-
tions of 1696, took alchemy to mean transmutation and described it as an aspect of
chemistry. This new chemistry, of which alchemy was a part, was dened primarily
as a set of practical procedures for acquiring knowledge.
346 R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352
The importance of ways of establishing knowledge was a topic in vogue. Francis
Bacon suggested that nature should be placed under constraint and vexed in order
to learn (p. 133); Rene Descartes referred to a habit of discovering truths, beginning
with easy things and passing by degrees to more dicult ones by handicraft (p.
135). Moran indicates a resemblance to alchemy in both these cases. Robert Boyle
blended Cartesianism and Paracelsian and Helmontian alchemical traditions, in an
experimental philosophy inspired by Francis Bacon. With van Helmont he rejected both
the microcosmmacrocosm connection and the claim that all matter was composed of
Sulphur, Salt and Mercury; but he abandoned a long search for van Helmonts universal
solvent having apparently decided that the alchemist had taken his secret with him into
the grave. Boyle decried speculation on the principles of matter, but took his corpuscu-
larian theory from an alchemical tradition. He sought the Philosophers Stone so that he
might talk with angels and make manifest Gods existence. Above all, Boyle experi-
mented. Johann Joachim Becher diered from Boyle on the topic of what made up mat-
ter, but agreed on the importance of acting on nature rather than simply observing it;
Georg Ernst Stahl, an admirer of Becher and proponent of a new form of vitalism,
agreed, claiming that art was very similar to nature and could imitate it for useful
purposes.
Successive approaches blended mechanism and experimentalism. Friedrich Homan
drew on a mechanical philosophy in his explanations of phenomena and claimed that
chemistry could reveal hidden properties in bodies: he called the experience a practitioner
obtained in this way the rst parent of truth (p. 160). Such a straightforward and all-
embracing system, in which everything was about the physical relationships between par-
ticles, was a triumph in terms of teaching medicine; but where Homan criticised the use of
ancient texts, Isaac Newtons alchemical, philosophical, mathematical and theological
pursuits depended on it. He tested his syncretist readings by experiment and worked in
alchemy as part of his natural philosophy, seeking proof that God continually acted in
the world through forces acting at a distance between pieces of matter. Other authors,
including John Freind in 1712 and Hermann Boerhaave later in the eighteenth century,
took on modied versions of mechanism, with occult forces (Freind) or the occasional
non-mechanical cause for a phenomenon (Boerhaave). By the eighteenth century, accord-
ing to Moran, chemistry had become a major part of the new, experimental science but
retained many of the questions of traditional alchemy (pp. 180181). Most importantly,
learned proponents now dened it as the set of practical procedures that had always been
at its heart. Eighteenth-century chemistry, despite the occasional attempts of its adher-
ents to suggest otherwise, remained part of a tradition that stretched back to Rupescissa,
Bacon and pseudo-Lull, and beyond.
As compelling as we may nd the picture painted by Moran, it is important to be clear
about the grounds for his claim that artisans and scholars were joined . . . together in the
pursuit of natural knowledge (p. 189). What the book demonstrates is not so much junc-
ture as juxtaposition. The account of artisans engagement in alchemy takes place princi-
pally in the second chapter, while the discussions of mechanism and experimentalism,
topics more closely associated with versions of the Scientic Revolution, are in the fth
and sixth. By this point the narrative is concerned with scholars interpreting phenomena,
the mechanics involved (in both senses) having moved to the background. The suggestion
is perhaps one of appropriation: following in the footsteps of Edgar Zilsel, a number of
scholars have proposed that both mechanical and experimental philosophies owed a great
R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352 347
deal to early modern artisanal culture.
5
We can go further, however, and document the
continuing involvement of artisans in these experimental projects. Moran is right: alchemy
does provide an interesting case for examining the relationship between scholars and
artisans.
It is, of course, an open question how far we can recover such practical pursuits, espe-
cially when the majority of the evidence that survives consists of composed texts. Larry
Stewart has suggested that to understand the activities of members of the Royal Society
in the period after the Reformation, we must follow them in their shift away from the tex-
tual to the practical, and look at events and deeds rather than books; the recommendation
is worth bearing in mind in our case.
6
The aspect of alchemy to which we have greatest
access is its textual traditiondespite the rhetoric of secrecy and of oral transmission of
knowledge we have inherited a vast corpus of alchemical worksand we should take care
to reect that. Histories that focus on alchemical writings, after all, need not rest on the
supposition that there was nothing more to alchemy than authorship.
7
But any wish to
recapture something more of the chemical practice of alchemy, of its distillations and cal-
cinations, of its associations with metallurgy or pharmacy or the household, demands that
we attend to events and deeds, and extrapolate carefully from those extraordinary cases of
which we have record. There are aspects of practice that were not written down, either
because they could not, as in the case of the tacit skills demanded of an alchemist and iden-
tied by John French as absent from texts, or because they were invisible, as with the ser-
vants and assistants who disappeared from accounts of experiments except when they did
something wrong.
8
To understand alchemy as a practical activity we must pay attention to
it as a social activity.
Indeed, as French identied, and as alchemical literature claimed, a key relationship in
alchemy was between an adept and his apprentice. Those chemical practitioners who
sought wisdom might read texts but they were best advised to nd a person to ask. Tho-
mas Charnock, a sixteenth-century alchemist, had been left a number of alchemical books
when his uncle died, but several years later, at the age of twenty, began to search through-
out England for alchemical secrets, and was only initiated by two adepts (a priest and a
former abbot) when he reached twenty-eight.
9
These encounters were not always as clan-
destine as such accounts might imply. Particularly with the spread of Paracelsianism,
alchemists oered their services as tutors and provided regular classes, both theoretical
and practical. William Yworth, known in his texts under the pseudonym Cleidophorus
Mystagogus, started teaching chemical theory and practice at the Academia Spagyrica
Nova in London shortly after he arrived in England in 1691.
10
Such ties bring us right
up to the period of the experimental philosophy. Robert Plot, who was (among other
things) appointed professor of chemistry at Oxford, teaching at the building created for
the Ashmolean Museum from 1683 until 1690, and John Mayow, medical practitioner,
experimental philosopher and author of tracts of medical and chemical interest, were both
5
See, for example, Zilsel (1942); Bennett (1986); Smith (2004).
6
Stewart (1992), pp. 330.
7
See, for example, Kassell (2005), pp. 173189.
8
Shapin (1994), pp. 355407.
9
Schuler (2004); Taylor (19381946), p. 149.
10
Mandelbrote (2004).
348 R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352
taught chemical techniques by a man called William Wilden in a course in Oxford in
1667.
11
Courses such as these were useful for alchemists and experimental philosophers
not only to learn skills themselves, but to improve those of their servants. Robert Boyle
wrote in 1661 enquiring about the possibility of sending a servant to lessons in a labora-
tory in Oxford and was assured that the boy would be taught to operate with his own
hands.
12
Servants were often crucial participants. Many alchemical processes required continu-
ous supervision for a long period of time and skilled operators were employed to man the
furnaces and stills. John Dee hired Roger Cooke to be his alchemical assistant at the age of
fourteen in 1567, a position Cooke held till 1581; after this period Cooke may have worked
with the London-based medical practitioner and alchemist Francis Anthony and helped
Henry Percy with a still house in the Tower.
13
References to such assistants, frequently
described as laborants, occur in many correspondences and books of the period: witness
Samuel Hartlibs remark to Robert Boyle in 1654 that he was waiting for his son-in-laws
laborant to arrive, or Boyles reference in A chymical paradox of 1682 to one managing
distillations for him.
14
Assistants were usually seen as skilful, but probably not knowledge-
able; one of the interlocutors in Boyles The sceptical chymist distinguished betwixt those
chymists, that are either cheats, or but laborants, and the true adepti.
15
Yet the boundaries between assistant and alchemist tended to be uid, where they
existed at all. The dierence between one and the other could be remarkably little and
was sometimes a matter of perception. Roger Cooke, Dees assistant, had been in the posi-
tion for around twelve years when Dee passed on an alchemical secret to him; a year and a
half later, in the summer of 1581, the two argued when Cooke was not invited to be pres-
ent during an alchemical experiment and he left soon afterwards. On his leaving, Dee
promised him 100 and some pretty alchemical experiments, wheruppon he might hon-
estly live.
16
Sometimes it was simply a question of ones relationship with others. Peter
Stahl was a Paracelsian alchemist who came to London from the continent in the late
1650s and settled in Oxford, temporarily working as a laboratory technician for Boyle,
but moving out of Boyles house and starting out as a private chemistry tutor shortly after-
wards.
17
It was not uncommon for someone who worked as an assistant to supplement
that primary income by producing medicines and other alchemically signicant sub-
stances. Christopher White, who had learned his skills as an assistant on Stahls courses
and served Boyle for a decade, moved back to Oxford in 1676 to set up and run a univer-
sity chemical laboratory in the Ashmolean Museum; aside from demonstrations for stu-
dents to accompany the lectures, he ran a dispensary in the laboratory, producing
chemical medicines.
18
If ones status within the alchemical world was linked to ones relationships to other
practitioners, those relationships presented an opportunity for redetermining that status.
11
Turner (2004); Brock (2004).
12
Young (2004).
13
Kassell (2004).
14
Shapin (1994), pp. 362363.
15
Shapin (1994), p. 363. William Newman and Lawrence Principe take George Starkey to have made a similar
distinction: Newman & Principe (2002), pp. 153154.
16
Kassell (2004).
17
Young (2004); Meynell (1995).
18
Simcock (2004).
R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352 349
The case of Cooke and Dee is a clear example in which learning alchemical secrets was, at
least in Cookes eyes, a route from assistant to something more; but in other situations it
might well be the teachers status at issue. The relationship between teacher and student
was not always that of adept to apprentice. Simon Forman, whose self-portrayal often
seems at odds with what we can reconstruct about his life and practices, acknowledged
only one debt to someone he had encountered in person: a simple fellowe had taught
him in the alchemical art.
19
George Starkey instructed Robert Boyle in chemical proce-
dures, in return for which Boyle (against Starkeys will) did his best to portray Starkey
as a technician by writing him out of his experimental accounts.
20
In fact, it is worthy of remark that some of those whose experiences we are trying to
recover as those of artisans did their utmost to escape that label. I have already men-
tioned Forman, who eaced the social dimensions of his education and emphasised his
debts to texts and divine inspiration communicated through dreams. His self-portrayal
was as a learned and inspired magus, not an artisan.
21
It is worth considering how we
might categorise John Hester, a Paracelsian distiller who made medicinal preparations
including an Elixer vitae and La petra philosophale nostra; he made his living selling
these but also produced medical books, editing Thomas Hills translation A joyfull jewell
(London, 1579), writing a guide to distilling oils, and translating various works by Para-
celsus and others.
22
It is worth wondering, in fact, if in trying to categorise him we might
not actually be missing the point.
Lawrence Principe has reminded us that alchemy is not something that admits of easy
generalisations; it was precisely this breadth (social as well as cultural) and the variety of
available associations that lent it such an ambivalent aspect.
23
Alchemists might be seen as
conmen, deluded fools seeking riches but overestimating human capacity to imitate nat-
ure, healers, elite guardians of secret wisdom, or simply philanthropic craftsmen. Expertise
was claimed by and imputed to participants based on practical experience, personal
instruction, reading and inspiration. The suggestion that someone sought to derive money
from their practice was as likely to be an insult as an analytical category.
24
The artisanal
and the scholarly are dicult for us to tease apart precisely because they were dicult to
separate then. The new forms of natural philosophy that appeared in the early modern
period, however, were created by gentlemen and functioned largely as part of genteel cul-
ture.
25
Legitimacy, at least for the proponents of the experimental philosophy, related to
the lack of pecuniary incentive felt by a philosopher as opposed to an artisan. Gentlemen
approached practical matters not as their dull, and unavoidable, and perpetual employ-
ments, but as their Diversions, wrote Thomas Sprat in his history of the Royal Society,
and much Treasure must sometimes be scatterd without any return.
26
Finances and mind
rendered the gentleman of means more suited to the improvement of knowledge than the
artisan dependent on his craft. Experimental philosophy elevated the importance of the
19
Kassell (2005), esp. pp. 5659.
20
Newman (1994), pp. 7072; Newman & Principe (2002), pp. 208222, 269270.
21
Kassell (2005), esp. pp. 5659.
22
Bennell (2004).
23
Principe (2000), p. 217.
24
For debates over the commercial possibilities of alchemy see Nummedal (2002).
25
Shapin (1994).
26
Ibid., pp. 396397.
350 R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344352
practical arts and denied the capacity of artisans to determine how best to prosecute them.
Alchemical operators could still nd roles assisting in laboratories. They employed the
same techniques of chemical manipulation. But the relative social diversity of alchemy
was replaced with a structure whose boundaries were more carefully policed. Artisans
could be adepts but they could not be philosophers.
So while it is useful to note that the artisans and scholars joined . . . together picture
owes more than a little to the rhetoric of experimental philosophers, we have nevertheless
returned to Morans animated muddle of belief, disillusion, and reinterpretation. It is one
of the merits of a good textbook that it exposes the strengths and weaknesses of the sec-
ondary literature. Distilling knowledge both oers an introduction to issues such as this
one and makes their exploration a less daunting prospect. The work is a thoughtful and
clear overview of territory that is still far from completely explored. This is an overdue,
impressive, and above all useful book.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lauren Kassell and Jill Whitelock for their helpful comments.
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