VICKERS, Brian. The New Historiography and The Limits of Alchemy PDF

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The ‘New Historiography’ and the

Limits of Alchemy
Published online: 09 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: (2008) The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy, Annals of Science,
65:1, 127-156, DOI: 10.1080/00033790701245497
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ANNALS OF SCIENCE,
Vol. 65, No. 1, January 2008, 127156
Essay Review
The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy

WILLIAM R. NEWMAN and LAWRENCE M. PRINCIPE, editors. George Starkey,
Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence. Chicago: Chicago University
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 05:43 11 November 2014
Press, 2004. xxxvi 352 pp. $80.00. ISBN 0-226-57701-5.
WILLIAM R. NEWMAN, Promethean Ambitions. Alchemyand the Quest to Perfect Nature.

Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. xv 333 pp. $30.00. ISBN 0-226-57712-0.
LAUREN KASSELL, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Simon Forman:

Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. xviii281 pp.
£58.00. ISBN 0-19-927905-5.
REVIEWED BY
BRIAN VICKERS, School of Advanced Study, London University, Senate House,

Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK
I
On 26 January 1652, George Starkey, the American alchemist, writing from his
lodgings in St. James’s to Robert Boyle at his house in Stalbridge, Dorsetshire,
announced his belief that he had discovered the alkahest (‘a solvent described by Van
Helmont’, as the editors gloss the term in Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks,
‘supposedly able to divide all substances into their component ingredients and
then reduce these further into their primordial water’):
the second repetition of the devouring water has, with God’s blessing, made me
whole, and will make me a philosopher. . . . Ah, would that labor and diligence
could thoroughly investigate everything in its first and final causes! Then at
least that hateful adage would not always set down an obstacle: ‘Hear the other
side’. (78)
Although Starkey’s learned editors have not identified the source of this saying,
‘audi partem alteram’, it is in fact the Heliastic Oath, which all 6000 Athenian citizens
chosen to serve in the annual pool of jurors had to swear. At the opening of his
famous speech On the Crown, Demosthenes reminded Athenians that ‘beyond all
your other obligations, you have specifically sworn to listen to both sides equally’.1
1
Demosthenes, On the Crown, 2; in Demosthenes, Speeches 18 and 19, tr. Harvey Yunis (Austin, TX,
2005), 32. See also Yunis’s excellent edition of the Greek text, Demosthenes. On the Crown (Cambridge,
2001), 107.
Annals of Science ISSN 0003-3790 print/ISSN 1464-505X online # 2008 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/00033790701245497
128 Essay Review
Why Starkey should have termed it ‘a hateful adage’ is not clear; but it is, I suggest, a
motto peculiarly appropriate for historians of alchemy.
Professors William R. Newman (Indiana University) and Lawrence M. Principe
(Johns Hopkins University) have established themselves over the last two decades as
among the leading authorities on early modern alchemy in the English-speaking
world, and form part of what Principe has called ‘the New Historiography of
Alchemy’.2 Separately, they have published several important books and articles, and
together they wrote Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of
Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2002), to which this edition of Starkey’s notes and
letters ‘should be considered a companion’ (xiv). The material they have brought
together here, some of it previously unknown, comes from the Royal Society, the
British Library, Oxford and Cambridge University Libraries, the Hartlib Papers, and
East Sussex Record Office (Lewes). Each of the sixteen documents is prefaced by a
concise note giving its biographical and alchemical context; texts are meticulously
transcribed, those in Latin accompanied by lucid English translations on the page,
expanding Starkey’s idiosyncratic alchemical symbols (which are separately listed).
The whole is rounded off by a useful glossary and an index (but no bibliography). It
is hard to conceive that this material could have been better presented.
But the framework with which they interpret Starkey’s laboratory notes is much
less satisfactory, for it attends to only ‘one side’ of alchemy. As in their earlier
publications, the authors wish to present alchemy as the forerunner of modern
industrial and pharmaceutical chemistry, and to downplay its links with both
spiritual and occult traditions. Newman and Principe dismiss ‘those who see alchemy
in monolithic terms as an inherently spiritual discipline whose chief goal lay in
perfecting the adept himself’. They describe this viewpoint as ‘anachronistic’,
devolving ‘not from alchemy as it was practiced in Starkey’s time but from the
Victorian occult revival’ (x). However, one of the basic alchemical operations, the use
of heat to release ‘spirit’ from ‘matter’, has long been seen as analogous to the
relationship between soul and body. The oldest surviving alchemical text is the
Phusika Kai Mystika, a metallurgical recipe book dating from c.200 bc to ad 100,
which combines practical and mystical goals. According to a modern scholar, the
processes it describes were intended to produce iōsis, ‘the release of the golden, fiery
nature hidden within base metal (initially copper)’, using such ‘metal-transforming
experiments as a rite for a new Hellenistic redemption cult for the soul, in the dualist
tradition of earlier Orphic-Pythagorean rituals’.3 Another early text, produced by
Zosimos of Panopolis in the fourth century ad, synthesized alchemical texts with
Hermeticism and Gnosticism, and, according to Robert Halleux, ‘was the first to
establish a homology between the transformation of metals and that of the human
operator. Carnal man, prey to the daimons of destiny, works the timely tinctures’ of
metals so that his spirit ‘can be reunited with the divine’.4 Later commentators, such
as Olympiodorus the Neoplatonist, amplified these religio-philosophical elements,
2
See his essay, ‘Reflections on Newton’s Alchemy in the Light of the New Historiography of Alchemy’,
in Newton and Newtonianism. New Studies, edited by James E. Force and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht,
Netherlands, 2004), 20519.
3
C. Anne Wilson, ‘Philosophers, Iōsis and Water of Life’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and
Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, 19 (1984), 101219, ‘Summary’, 200.
4
Robert Halleux, ‘Alchemy’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., edited by Simon Hornblower
and Antony Spawforth (Oxford, 1996), 5253.
Essay Review 129
and in the Arabic Middle Ages a huge amount of religious doctrine, of the most
varied kind, became attached to alchemical texts.5 In 1979, Robert Halleux compiled
a basic bibliography of alchemy and religion, which could now be greatly expanded.6
Indeed, the editors themselves have identified several instances of the ‘religious,
spiritual, or esoteric’ dimension of alchemy. In 1991, Newman defined an ‘initiatic
style’ in the Summa Perfectionis, derived from a ninth-century Islamic sect, the
Brethren of Purity.7 In 1998, Principe drew attention to the influx of occult ideas in
the later fifteenth century, as writers such as Trithemius and Agrippa von Nettesheim
‘linked some chemical notions with the cabala, Hermetic and neoplatonic mysticism,
and natural magic’. This synthesis of alchemy with what we would call the occult
sciences was intensified by Paracelsus, who, as Principe put it:
devised a world-system populated with a vast number of supernatural beings

and elemental spirits and where natural and sympathetic magic played a central
role in an organic cosmos. The material tria prima of Mercury, Sulphur, and
Salt was linked in a web of correspondences that included the Triune Godhead
and the threefold nature of man: spirit, soul, and body.8
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemy, these new religious strands co-existed
with others, extending from simple metaphors to grandiose metaphysical schemes,
making it otiose to deny this spiritual dimension.9 Indeed, Principe himself has
presented new evidence that Boyle*perhaps influenced by John Dee’s notorious
experiences with Edward Kelley*expressed the hope that ‘the acquisition of the
Philosopher’s Stone would facilitate communication with angels and rational
spirits’.10 Principe’s pioneering discussion of this element in Boyle’s alchemy*he
promises a fuller study of the ‘supernatural school’ is based on two unpublished
documents recently discovered by Michael Hunter, the great renovator of Boyle
Studies.11 Principe describes it as ‘a remarkable discovery’, and his discussion valuably
5
See, e.g., A.J. Festugière, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismegiste 1: L’Astrologie et les sciences occultes,
2nd ed. (Paris, 1950), ch. 7, ‘L’Hermétisme et l’alchimie’ (21782); Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und
Geheimwissenschaft im Islam (Leiden, 1972 Handbuch der Orientalistik), 145270, Paul Kraus, Jabir ibn
Hayyan. Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques en Islam. Jabir et la science grècque (Cairo, 1942;
Paris, 1986), 187303.
6
Robert Halleux, Les Textes Alchimiques (Turnhout, 1979; ‘Typologie des sources de moyen age
occidental’, fasc. 32), 3738.
7
William R. Newman, The ‘Summa Perfectionis’ of the Pseudo-Geber (Leiden, 1991), 9098.
8
Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest: Including Boyle’s
‘‘Lost’’ Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 189.
9
For critical comments on Newman having ignored the ‘religious and mystical’ element in alchemy, see
Scott Mandelbrote’s review of Gehennical Fire in The British Journal for the History of Science, 30 (1997),
10911, and for a sustained critique of Newman and Principe’s ‘devaluation of religious sentiments’ see
Hereward Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the Work of Count
Michael Maier (15691622) (Berlin, 2003). I do not favour Tilton’s use of Jungian concepts, but he does
bring out the unquestionably mystical dimension of Maier’s work. See also Urszula Szulakowska, The
Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustrations (Leiden, Netherlands,
2000), which discusses astrological and religious influences on the work of John Dee, Heinrich Khunrath,
Robert Fludd, and Maier.
10
See Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 187. Principe refers to Deborah Harkness, Conversations with
Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999), a study which accepts Dee’s belief that
Kelley really brought him into contact with angelic powers. For the contrary view, that Dee was the victim
of a cruel hoax, see, e.g., Wayne Shumaker, Renaissance Curiosa (Binghamton, NY, 1982), 1552.
11
Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 197n.; Michael Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Monarchism in the
Thought of Robert Boyle’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 387410 at 39698 for
Boyle’s Dialogue on Spirits (which Principe reprints in an appendix to The Aspiring Adept [note 8], 31016)
and Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends (London, 1994).
130 Essay Review
places ‘Boyle’s notion of supernatural alchemical activity’ in its historical context.12

However, that sympathetic account, written in 1998, sits oddly with the dismissal of
spiritual alchemy as deriving from Victorian occultism that Principe and Newman
published in 2004. As Antonio Clericuzio has observed, the two historians ‘pay little
attention to a variety of themes . . . such as cosmology and religion, that do not fit
their picture of alchemy as proto-chemistry’. Further, from the recent Newman
Principe perspective, ‘revelation and divine illumination is another obstacle to be
removed in order to fully modernize Starkey and alchemy’.13
The ‘New Historiography’ of alchemy, in addition to downplaying the
spiritual dimension, has also tried to distance itself from any contact with the
occult. In Promethean Ambitions, William Newman seems particularly anxious to
‘avoid the easy and modern habit of grouping such topics as magic and alchemy
under a single, seemingly unproblematic rubric, such as ‘‘the occult sciences’’ or
‘‘the occult’’’*although few scholars would describe the occult sciences as
unproblematic (44). Newman also attacks ‘The hackneyed modern view that
automatically equates alchemy with witchcraft, necromancy, and a potpourri of
other practices and theories loosely labeled ‘‘the occult’’’, repeating the claim
that such a connection ‘has little historical validity before the nineteenth
century’ (54). Whether or not that view is ‘hackneyed’, it is certainly not
exclusively modern, for we have just seen Principe’s acknowledgement that, from
the late fifteenth century onwards, alchemy absorbed neo-Platonist, Hermetical,
and cabbalistic beliefs. Indeed, many of the authors that Newman himself
discusses turn out to have bracketed alchemy, in its claim to be able to
transform natural substances, with magic, witchcraft, and other demonic arts.
Albertus Magnus did so in the late 1240s, as did several ecclesiastic writers
between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries, most notoriously the Dominican
inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger in their witch-hunting manual,
the Malleus maleficarum (1487) (Promethean Ambitions, 4447, 5462). Other
writers who, as Newman shows, linked alchemy pejoratively with the occult
include the inquisitor general of Aragon, Nicholas Eymerich, in his 1376
Directorium inquisitorum, Alonso Tostado, the bishop of Avila, another leading
figure in the persecution of witches, Thomas Erastus, a vehement critic of
Paracelsus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benedetto Varchi (91, 9798, 108111, 121
23, 135). To equate alchemy with the destructive powers attributed to the occult
is certainly not justified, but both good and bad associations took place long
before the nineteenth century.
It is the duty of historians to recreate past beliefs and practices in a sympathetic
manner, but they must also preserve the detachment necessary to describe them
accurately. It may be that alchemy’s spiritual and occult associations are embarras-
sing to modern historians, especially those with a background in the natural sciences,
but there is no point denying them. Alchemy had such an enormous impact between
the Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century that it needs no other justification
or apology. Scholars should investigate every aspect of it, from surviving manuscripts
and books, as Newman and Principe have done so well, but without trying to
airbrush out of the record elements that seem to us less attractive. Two other
12
Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 188201, 31017.
13
See Clericuzio’s review of Alchemy Tried in the Fire in Annals of Science 62 (2005), 406408, at 407.
Essay Review 131
unpleasant traditional attributes of alchemy which they seek to play down are its
openness to fraud and the financial risks its practitioners took in pursuit of their
‘Quests’. For the first, in their introduction to Starkey’s Alchemical Laboratory
Notebooks and Correspondence, Newman and Principe attack what they feel to be
false conceptions of ‘the noble art’, starting with the image of it as ‘a chimerical and
single-minded obsession with the transmutation of lead into gold. This idea’, they
write, ‘derives from a long tradition of portraying alchemy as the embodiment of
folly or fraud, a view that attained its modern form in the opening years of the
eighteenth century’ (ix). Whatever this ‘modern form’ might be, both negative
attributes go back to the Middle Ages, and their own introduction concentrates on
the activities of what they prefer to call ‘chrysopoeians, that is, makers of gold’ (xv
ff.). In 1652, Starkey himself alleged that Thomas, the alchemist brother of the poet
Henry Vaughan, had ‘cheated various greedy people laboring under the sacred thirst
for gold of more than two thousand pounds, to whom he communicated his secrets
for money under an oath of silence, and now, his fraud having been detected, he
stinks hugely’ (60). Starkey, admirably enough, consistently disclaimed any mercen-
ary motives in his alchemical studies, preferring a life devoted to ‘a studious search of
Natures mysteryes’, but alchemy’s promise of being able to convert base metals into
gold was a massive temptation to the credulous (20). The relationship between (in
Francis Bacon’s phrase) ‘imposture’ and ‘credulity’ were graphically described in
many works ante-dating the Enlightenment, most memorably in Chaucer’s Canon
Yeoman’s Tale (c.1387) and in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1612). Indeed, Professor
Principe has described elsewhere, not without embarrassment, the disastrous episode
in 16771678 in which Robert Boyle was royally fleeced by the alchemical confidence
trickster Georges Pierre.14
The other risk inherent in alchemical pursuits was bankruptcy and ruin, brought
about by the expense of purchasing materials, building a furnace, and employing
operatives. In Promethean Ambitions, Newman cites Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the
Painters, which include accounts of two artists, Cosimo Rosselli and Parmigianino,
whose ‘infatuation with alchemy’ led to financial ruin. ‘‘‘Like all of those who attend
to it’’, Vasari says, Cosimo was reduced to poverty’, while Parmigianino ‘‘‘consumed
himself*bit by bit*with his furnaces’’’. Newman comments that Vasari ‘view[ed]
alchemy in a very jaundiced light’, as if such financial catastrophes, and the obsessive
behaviour patterns which created them, could be accepted as normal, and Vasari’s
views dismissed as some personal prejudice (124). In their joint-authored Alchemy
Tried in the Fire, Newman and Principe refer several times to George Starkey’s
‘financial problems’ or ‘financial hardship’, which are sympathetic euphemisms. The
fact is that Starkey financed his alchemical activity from his wife’s dowry, together
with contributions from Boyle and others in the Hartlib circle until August 1653,
when he went bankrupt and was confined to the debtor’s prison for several months.
Eschewing any moral judgement, the co-authors remark: ‘most importantly, while
14
See Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 11534, especially 128, where he argues that ‘to dismiss’ this
episode, in which Pierre duped Boyle out of an enormous sum of money, would be ‘not only too facile but
somewhat besides the point, and smacks too much of the dismissive spirit that once rejected all of
alchemical thought as unworthy of investigation’. But equally, to record it must establish the vulnerability
of alchemy to these accusations. Trying to draw a veil over Boyle’s gullibility, Principe prefers to take it as
proving his ‘great eagerness to acquire alchemical knowledge’ (133). But it was precisely such eagerness
that could be exploited by unscrupulous alchemists.
132 Essay Review
Starkey’s bankruptcy and confinement to debtor’s prison may reflect badly on the
quality of his financial sense, it cannot say anything about his chymical or intellectual
acuity’ (225, my italics). This comment seems to want to deflect attention from the
main issue, Starkey’s fruitless consumption of all his resources (we are not told what
happened to Starkey’s wife and family), to the subsidiary one, Starkey’s abilities as a
chymist*which are not in question. But the annals of alchemy are littered with
stories of bankruptcy, and we must surely accept this as one of the risks inherent in
the alchemical ‘quest’, as Newman and Principe often describe it, for the
Philosopher’s Stone, or for the Elixir that will cure all illnesses. Another risk to
the practising alchemist which they candidly concede, without attempted extenua-
tion, is that of mercury poisoning, which can induce the ‘paranoia and mental
instability’, as they put it, that may have affected not only Starkey but also Newton,
when he tried to carry out Starkey’s process for the Philosophical Mercury.15 Unlike
astrology, or mathematics, alchemy involved the acquisition of complex laboratory
equipment, including ever more efficient furnaces, expensive substances, and life-
threatening processes. Some alchemists had greater financial resources, but no one
was proof against risk and loss.
In the eyes of his editors, Starkey’s alchemy ‘was an experimental science’ (x). It is
true that the notebooks and letters contain many accounts of his practical work, but
they also include a remarkable amount of material copied out from the huge
alchemical literature stretching back to Greco-Roman Egypt: the ‘Green Tablet’ of
Hermes Trismegistus, various medieval authors (Bernardus Trevisanus, Basil
Valentine, the Augustinian canon George Ripley), and recent writers, especially J.
B. Van Helmont. Several sections of Starkey’s notebooks consist of ‘Collections out
of many Authors’, including one labelled ‘some undigested notes from Van Helmont’
(130, 330). In another, he attempts to synthesize ‘the whole current of Authors’ (228).
Starkey was not alone in this dependence on previous alchemical authors, but his
example does show that alchemy was inalienably a textual as well as an experimental
science. Indeed, as the editors show, many of Starkey’s own practical trials were
derived from books, such as Alexander von Suchten’s Of the Secrets of Antinomy
(English translation 1670).
But Starkey’s work, it seems to me, is distinguished by a sustained and self-aware
attempt to understand his authors. One of the major difficulties in studying alchemy,
as I have observed elsewhere, is its cumulative nature, the fact that alchemists copied
and recopied ancient texts, created bewildering variations in terminology, and used
allegorical or deliberately obscure accounts of substances and processes.16 It is
important to recognize that alchemy, in this respect like astrology and magic, was a
textually cumulative discipline. No text was ever thrown away, since none was ever
superseded. Potentially, any work produced in Hellenistic Egypt, Medieval Islam, or
Renaissance Europe, could divulge the arcanum arcanorum. All the alchemical texts
ever known, it seems, were collected into multi-volume editions in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, those vast tomes which are so prominent in paintings of
15
Lawrence M. Newman and William R. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the
Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2002), 225; Principe, Aspiring Adept (note 8), 17879.
16
Brian Vickers, ‘The Discrepancy between res and verba in Greek Alchemy’, in Alchemy Revisited,
edited by Z.R.W.M. von Martels (Leiden, Netherlands, 1990), 2133; German translation als ‘Alchemie als
verbale Kunst: die Anfänge’, in Chemie und Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Jürgen Mittelstrass and
Günther Stock (Berlin: Akademie, 1992), 1734.
Essay Review 133
alchemists from this period by Breughel, Teniers, and others.17 By the time that the
vast collections of miscellaneous tracts appeared in the seventeenth century, such as
Theatrum chemicum (comprising three volumes in 1602, five by 1622), the literature
was a mass of puzzles. Alchemy could only metamorphose into chemistry when some
practitioners ceased to rely on this textual morass and formulated new, independent
theories of substances and processes to be investigated by laboratory practice. Their
practical operations had undoubtedly benefited from the technological developments
made since the Arabic Middle Ages, but alchemy is, and always was, an art which
depends in large part on the interpretation of texts.
Thanks to the editors’ meticulous transcripts and translations, we can follow
Starkey in this unavoidable process of trying to interpret the texts on which he relied
for his laboratory praxis. At one point, he tries to grasp ‘the meaning of these two
Philosophers’, Paracelsus and Van Helmont, ‘the sense of this paragraph’ from
Bernard of Trier, what another writer means or ‘seems to imply’ or how to resolve a
‘seeming contradiction’ in an author (28, 45, 149, 230). Starkey even knew how to
sidestep his authors’ rhetoric: of one utterance by von Suchten, he wrote: ‘This I
believe is said hyperbolically and signifies no more than that it is accomplished
quickly’ (21415). Since, as Starkey put it, ‘the wise Philosophers with all their might
have sought & found, & left the record of their search in writing, withall so veyling
the maine secret that only an immediate hand of god must direct an Artist who by
study shal seeke to atteyne the same’, it follows that much of the early modern
alchemist’s work was hermeneutical, a search to discover an author’s intended
meaning (238). Starkey consciously attempts an ‘Explanation of Van Helmont’,
judging that the ‘interpretation’ he comes up with ‘is extremely probable’, but
certainty was impossible to achieve (149).
A most revealing document in this connection is the hitherto unpublished preface
that Starkey wrote for the projected publication of his commentary on the fifteenth-
century alchemist George Ripley’s treatise, The Compound of Alchemy. Starkey’s tract
had been published without his permission in Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical
Addresses: Made to Samuel Hartlib, Esquire (1655), and Starkey angrily wrote a
preface denouncing the plagiarism. In it, he also set out the rationale for his
alchemical hermeneutics, his sustained attempt to understand a text by paraphrasing
it in his own words:
I did make many essayes upon this little peice, which is a Course with me usuall
in whatever I am desirous to understande, Endeavouring to summ up what is
more largely delivered, & in other wordes, . . . to reduce it to a narrower
compasse in wordes of mine owne, this Systeme then to compare with my
Authour, & by meditation to examine seriously if so be that my Gloss doe not
corrupt the text, & if so, then to alter such of my wordes, or Phrases, as shall be
found thus peccant, thus will an Author’s meaninge (by God’s helpe, & study)
soone be attained. (312)
Starkey described at some length his hermeneutic technique of making ‘systematic-
call essayes’ on earlier alchemists, ‘cutting of theire Amplifications, yett delivering
their full sense (according as I understande them) in my owne, but as few wordes as I
17
For some illustrations showing vast tomes propped up on the alchemist’s work-bench, see Vickers,
‘Alchemie als verbale Kunst’ (note 16), 3134.
134 Essay Review
can, then after amplifying this systeme according to my owne Idea of the Subject’.
Whether or not this dual process of condensation and expansion managed to catch
‘the Sense of the Authour’ when applied to much-copied and philologically corrupt
texts, it does prove that, however committed it may have been to laboratory practice,
Starkey’s alchemy depended first and last on the interpretation of texts, and must
have been subject to some of the infirmities involved.
While feeling that the editors have not done justice to the complex traditions that
came together in early modern alchemy, I have nothing but praise for their edition and
commentary, which illuminates every stage of George Starkey’s activities. However, in
recreating individual contexts, it is inevitable that the continuity of the whole may not
receive as much attention. Reading through these notebooks twice in sequence, I was
struck by the number of times Starkey recorded great discoveries, experimental
breakthroughs as we might call them. In April or May 1651, he wrote to Boyle,
announcing: ‘I have already made a wonderful spirit that acts sine repassione’*that is,
‘without being acted upon’ (19). In normal chemical processes, as the editors explain,
once ‘acid has dissolved a certain amount of metal, it is no longer corrosive, having
been [weakened] by its activity in dissolving’. But, according to Van Helmont’s
description of it, ‘the alkahest is different . . .’ (xix). As they note, the search for this
‘marvellous solvent’ was ‘a chymical cause célèbre almost as widespread as the search
for the philosophers’ stone. . . . Clearly, it would have had great power in determining
the constituents of bodies and matter theory’*had it been discovered (xxi).
These notebooks record Starkey’s repeated attempts to isolate it: ‘I have found*
tho not the Alkahest’, he wrote in the same letter to Boyle, ‘for at present the search of
it lyes Subtus Scamnum [‘under the bench’]*yet one of the great Arcanum’, which
‘God by the fire hath taught me’, one which will vanquish the whole retinue of diseases
(27, 28). He added, ‘I do not here annexe the processe (Honourable Sir) of it for I am
now about it & have not perfected it being hindred by the unfortunate breaking of a
glasse . . .’ (29). The laboratory accident interrrupting operations at a crucial point is a
frequent theme in early modern alchemy. A month later, Starkey wrote to Johann
Moriaen, a German alchemist in close contact with Glauber, claiming that
Once I saw and even possessed the chrysopoeic and argyropoeic stones18; I was
an ocular witness of the former and an actual possessor of the latter. It had
been given to me by a certain young friend, still living, who had each of the two
Elixirs, whose name I am determined (being constrained by a vow) to hide
forever. He gave me a few ounces, and when I tried to multiply them, I lost the
greater part in the process. (35)
The mysterious anonymous donor is another recurrent feature in alchemical texts.
Writing to Frederick Clodius, the Holsatian alchemist in 1653/4, Starkey recalls Van
Helmont’s claim that he had once received ‘a particle of the aurific Elixir’ (that is,
half a grain of the Philosopher’s Stone) from a wandering man whom he knew for
only an evening. Similarly, Starkey met a Belgian alchemist in London to whom Van
Helmont had given ‘a little portion’ (portiunculam) of the Stone, and who supposedly
knew many other secrets, including that of the alkahest (91). On 18 August 1656,
Starkey himself wrote in his diary: ‘Today by the gift of God, an anonymous friend
18
Respectively, those supposedly able to produce gold and silver from base metals.
Essay Review 135
revealed to me the full practical knowledge of the grand Elixir under the sacrament
of silence’ (306).
Scholars studying alchemy need to recognize the recurring features in these
narratives, which help us to see alchemy as not only a record of experiments but as a
way of life, an experience in itself, full of hopes and disappointments. To Boyle,
Starkey confessed that ‘I always cry cras [‘tomorrow’] like a little crow, but I hope
finally that my ‘‘tomorrow’’ will be changed into today’; and, again to Boyle, ‘but
why should I recount my hopes to you?’ (54, 58). Practitioners needed occasional
assurances that the sought-after goal, whether the Philosopher’s Stone or the
alkahest, did exist, that it was possible to see or even hold it, if only as a ‘once in a
lifetime’ event. Practitioners also needed to feel close to discovering these great
arcana, or even to have achieved that goal themselves. Starkey seems to have felt this
need several times. In about December 1651, he noted to himself: ‘God commu-
nicated to me the whole secret of volatilizing alkalies’ (43). On 26 January 1652, he
wrote exultantly to Boyle to announce that
God, pitying a searcher’s labors, studies, vigils, and anxieties, finally opened to
me the gates of nature and gave me not only the understanding but also the
possession of that immortal liquor Ignis aqua, and now finally I sing a hymn to
my God, since only He is worthy. Therefore, now ask and I shall answer you.
Nor does it hide from me, for I have seen with my own eyes . . . (66)
Starkey uses the language of religious witnessing*‘I know (because I have seen) that
what I say is true’ (71). And his utterance (‘now ask and I shall answer you’) takes on
a biblical form: compare Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Ask, and it
shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’
(Matt. 7:7). The term Ignis aqua comes from one of Van Helmont’s frequent dreams.
The dream vision was another recurring feature in alchemical narratives, and Starkey
also used it to describe how he was visited by one Eugenius, a ‘good spirit’ who
revealed the secret of how to prepare ‘the true alkahest’ (6972). After this excited,
almost incoherent letter to Boyle, it is surprising to find, in Starkey’s Bristol
notebook, four years later (20 March 1656), the laconic entry: ‘God revealed to me
the whole secret of the liquor alkahest’. A further two years later (20 September
1658), Starkey wrote in his current notebook:
From the year 1647 up to this very year and day, I have exerted myself in the
search for the liquor alkahest with many studies, vigils, labors, and costs. Today
for the first time it has been granted and conceded to my unworthy self by the
highest Father of Lights, the best and greatest God, to attain complete
knowledge of it and to see its final end. (329)
But in another autobiographical note, Starkey gave a different date to this great
event: ‘About the end of the year 1654 the whole secret was revealed to me by divine
grace. From that time up to this year 1660 I was impeded by various obstructions
from bringing the work to complete perfection’ (332; translation).
What was it that Starkey found in 1652, 1654, 1656, and 1658?19 Whatever it was,
a notebook from 16571658 records his continuing state of uncertainty, as he listed
19
In their earlier study, Newman and Principe suggested that Starkey may have ‘decided that his first
preparation was not the correct one’ (Alchemy Tried in the Fire [note 15], 104n., 128, 200). However,
Starkey nowhere hints at this possibility.
136 Essay Review
‘Some Questions of Great Importance to be Resolved by the Fire Concerning the

Liquor Alkahest’: (1) ‘In what form should it appear?’; (2) ‘Whether it is a liquid
absolutely distillable in the form of liquid, or rather a liquid impregnated with an
immortal salt?’ (323). These and the following questions seem to exist at the level of
wondering, ‘how would I know it, if I saw it?’. Citing texts from Paracelsus and Van
Helmont brings Starkey no immediate clarification (the utterance of Eugenius, he
recorded earlier, ‘was more obscure than Paracelsus himself’), and Starkey honestly
records that ‘the question as yet remains entangled with many knots’ (325). The
editors say of a late notebook that it helps us ‘to gauge the long-term progress of
Starkey’s quest’ for the alkahest, but there can have been no ‘progress’ if he claimed
to have discovered it four times over (328). The presence of these recurring events
suggests that the early modern alchemist’s life, like his day-to-day operations, are to
be seen not as a forerunner of industrial or pharmaceutical chemistry (although
Starkey did produce medicines and cosmetics) but as the narrative of quests for
revelation, to be achieved after enormous labour and dedication*of which Starkey
regularly complains*only by the grace of God. To concentrate on the technological
aspects of alchemy is not to ‘hear the other side’, with its spiritual dimension, and its
inbuilt patterns of hope, failure, and eventual success. The rise and fall of alchemy
has such inherent historical significance that its study does not need to be validated
by its having anticipated modern chemistry (a proto-Whiggish approach), but simply
in itself, as a complex practice having several ‘other sides’, textual and practical,
material and spiritual.
II
Alchemy was only one of the pursuits of Simon Forman (15521611), who made
his name as an astrologer and physician, attracting up to a thousand patients a year.
According to Lauren Kassell, in her remarkably detailed study, ‘Forman lived with
and through his papers, constantly shifting passages, copying and recopying, never
completing’ (12). He left behind a vast assemblage of notes, running to ‘15,000
written pages’, of which his notes on alchemy ‘constitute about a quarter’ (2, 171). A
typical instance of the eagerness with which Forman started new projects and
abandoned old ones took place in August 1606, when he was copying the ‘Emerald
Tablet’ ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, with Hortulanus’ commentary (Newton
was still engaged in this exercise in the 1680s).20 Forman broke off his copying to
write a treatise on the Philosopher’s Stone, but he failed to complete either task. As
Kassell comments, ‘Whatever Forman’s intentions, he did not produce a coherent
account of the philosopher’s stone, nor of the relation between alchemy, magic, and
medicine. But he devoted several reams of paper and dozens of quills and bottles of
ink to the study of alchemy and magic’, interspersing notes on the ‘astrological
significance’ of this material. Forman was the archetypal occultist, fusing all his
pursuits together, resisting any modern attempt to cordon off alchemy from the other
disciplines. To her credit, Kassell recognizes that ‘alchemy was both a textual and a
practical tradition’, and her recreation of Forman’s note-taking places him at the
20
Newton’s commentary on the ‘Emerald Tablet’ was translated by Betty Jo Dobbs in The Janus Faces
of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge, 1991), 27677, and reprinted in Stanton
J. Linden’s useful anthology, The Alchemy Reader. From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge,
2003), 24647.
Essay Review 137
opposite pole from George Starkey, that meticulous scholar always aware of the need
to interpret alchemical texts (173). Forman seems to have copied out whatever he
could lay his hands on: as Kassell puts it, his transcriptions of alchemical texts were
‘informed more by happenstance than deliberation’, and sometimes he did not know
what he was copying (179). Her revealing discussion of Forman’s work on the use of
antimony, which he called ‘cako’, shows that in 1598 he copied out a short treatise,
not knowing the identity of its author (17389).21 Kassell identifies it as the ‘Second
treatise on antimony’ by the Paracelsian Alexander von Suchten, ‘printed in German
in 1570, Latin in 1575, and promptly translated into English and circulated in
manuscript’ (176). In his first transcription, Forman changed the plain style of the
original by adding introductions and conclusions in ‘the florid language typical of

medieval alchemical texts’, giving no indication of its authorship (179). But when he
copied it again, a year or so later, in an alchemical commonplace book called
‘Principles of philosofi’, Forman claimed authorship, signing it with his own name
(18081). This act of plagiarism is now revealed, four centuries later, thanks to
Lauren Kassell. Not content with a single appropriation, Forman copied out von
Suchten’s text again in a treatise ‘of appoticarie drugs’, a commonplace book which
Kassell dates c.1607, and ‘transformed it’ again, unfortunately becoming quite
confused in the process, equating crude ore of antimony with the regulus, and
making other errors (18384). Kassell’s discussion, illustrated with many high-quality
reproductions of Forman’s manuscripts (our thanks are due to an enlightened
publisher) brings to life an alchemist, relying solely on written sources, seated at his
desk and copying out indiscriminately ‘texts reputedly ancient and modern, English
and Arabic, transmutational, medical, and spiritual’ (179).22 Kassell also describes
Forman as a book-collector, on the strength of a manuscript note reminding himself
to look up some references in Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (35,
5152). However, as Mordechai Feingold has objected, ‘every piece of evidence we
have suggests that Forman copied and owned manuscripts, not printed books’. The
significance of ‘Forman’s immersion in the culture of scribal publication’, as Feingold
points out, is that ‘manuscipts were the preferred source for Renaissance practi-
tioners of alchemy and astrology, especially of those lacking formal education’.23
Although Forman, copyist and plagiarist, indifferent to the meanings of his texts,
stands at the opposite pole from the scrupulous George Starkey, he shared with him
several features of the alchemical tradition. Forman also used the language of
religious witnessing and divine revelation, piously declaring in his second treatise ‘Of
Cako’ that
21
Kassell notes that ‘A treatise on cachelah’ circulated among Dee’s circle in the 1580s, and suggests
that the word ‘cako’ derives from ‘the Hebrew ‘‘Kochav’’ meaning star, perhaps indicating the star regulus
of antimony’ (179), or quicksilver, which is produced when metalline antimony is further refined with other
metals.
22
For further details of Forman’s eclectic reading, see chapter three, ‘How to Write Like a Magus’
(5474), 57, 68 (‘he drew heavily on Latin astrological texts, often denigrating their authors while flaunting
his own learning’), 163, 174, 186 (on ‘Forman’s doctrinal and practical eclecticism’), 188, and the
Bibliography of ‘Simon Forman’s Principal Manuscripts’ (23340).
23
Mordechai Feingold, ‘A Conjurer and a Quack? The Lives of John Dee and Simon Forman’,
Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 54559, at 545. The truth of this observation can be confirmed
from Steven W. May’s recent and magisterial Elizabethan Poetry. A Bibliography and First-line Index of
English Verse, 15591603, 3 vols (London, 2004). See my review in Times Literary Supplement, 10 February
2006, 7.
138 Essay Review
I cam to the knowledge therof . . . with my owne handes and eyes. I sawe and
proved the experience ther of at my owne coste and charges secretly. For yt was
the will of god yt should be soe. For in all my practizes and workings I never
came to any knowledge, but only by the will of god and by my owne industry &
coste. (181)
Like Starkey, Helmont, and many others, Forman recorded dreams involving
alchemy. At one point, he collected in his commonplace book twenty-one ‘dremes
and visions that I have sene totching the philosophers stone’ (59). In September 1595,
‘he ‘‘drempt of 3 black cats, and of my philosophical powder which I was distiling’’.
In October 1595, he dreamt that a man wrote some words about the philosophers’
stone on Forman’s coat and gave him two kinds of white powder’ (173). Forman also
gave his version of the alchemist’s recurrent narrative of having almost gained
knowledge of the great arcanum, what might be called ‘the moment of near success’.
In March 1596, he recorded a dream in which ‘a friend gave him some of the
philosophers’ stone in liquid form. Forman cupped it in his hand, but before he could
find a glass to hold it, it ran through his fingers’ (ibid.). So near, and yet so far.
Forman was equally eclectic in his medical practice. A self-taught astrologer and
exponent of Paracelsian chemical remedies, he was in constant conflict with the
London College of Physicians, loyal adherents to Galenic humoural medicine, as
Kassell describes in great detail (7399). But although Forman believed he could
cure the plague by his skill in astrology alone, in fact, as Kassell shows, he
pragmatically ‘combined Galenic and Paracelsian definitions of disease’ (10914,
116). He was not above resorting to school medicine, using ‘a conventional, surgical
method, for treating plague sores by lancing them, and combining bloodletting with
purges (153, 155).24 ‘Forman’s writings on the plague’, Kassell judges, ‘like most of
his treatises, are incoherent, eclectic’, and were constantly rewritten, until he could
list ‘thousands of rules for judging the astrological causes of a disease’ (102, 11314).
The dominance of astrology in Forman’s work as a physician for whom ‘astrology
was not an adjunct of medicine; medicine was an adjunct of astrology’, is revealed by
the several thousand casebooks that survive covering the period 15961601, which
Kassell analyses in psychological, sociological, and astrological terms (90). One
major link between Forman’s main preoccupations was the written tradition, even
stronger in astrology than in alchemy, indeed a fundamental characteristic of the
occult sciences, with their reverence for written authority. ‘Astrology was by
definition a written art’, Kassell writes, lacking a practical dimension*although
she oddly refers to Forman making ‘an astrological experiment’, and the surviving
casebooks record the quantities of horoscopes that Forman wrote (132). Where
conventional physicians inspected a patient’s urine, Forman contemptuously rejected
such indices, assured that he could discern ‘the cause of a disease’ simply by casting
an astrological figure (140). In this process, he first ‘charted the stars and then
mapped the disease onto the patient’s body’, a classic instance of a priori practices,
far removed from empirical observation (141).
Like other astrological physicians, the majority of Forman’s patients were women
(130), and he believed that, rather than examining a female patient, ‘the astrologer
should consult the stars to see if a woman was a virgin, then whether she was
24
For further details of Forman’s use of Galenic medicine, see Barbara H. Traister, The Notorious
Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago, 2001).
Essay Review 139
pregnant’ (162). Kassell’s account of Forman’s treatment of women is studiously

unjudgemental. Since she is not writing a biography, she is able to ignore the scandal
of Forman’s many sexual relationships with his female patients, documented by A. L.
Rowse and Michael MacDonald25, but she is too kind to his misogyny and
monocausality. His notebooks contain stock denunciations of the sins of women
as the cause of all evils, including plague. Throughout his writings, as Kassell shows,
‘Forman framed the diseases of women according to notions of their sexual activity
and moral accountability’ (16062). Forman even recommended physicians to ignore
anything said by female patients, since women’s words were not to be trusted. He
systematically disregarded his patients’ own accounts of their illnesses, preferring to
cast their horoscopes. Kassell speaks of these consultations as initiating ‘a new
dynamic between the astrologer-physician and his patient’, based on trust (159).
However, it seems to me that Forman simply imposed his own scheme on to their
situation, for whatever his patients’ complaint, ‘only the stars revealed the truth’
(161). All human ailments were supposedly determined by the ‘horary figures’ which
Forman constructed out of the time of day at which the consultation took place, the
positions of the zodiacal signs and the five known planets (13233). No doubt, this
single explanatory system can provide thousands of possible correlations, internally
generated and self-sustaining, but as a mode of diagnosing and treating illness, it is
hard to know whom one would have preferred to consult in Elizabethan London,
Simon Forman or a graduate of the College of Physicians. It is fortunate that in many
cases, the body cures itself.
Although a scholarly work, the fruit of sustained dedication to its topic, Kassell’s
study is not without faults. The degree of involvement with the material relics of
Forman’s career needed to re-create his preoccupations in such detail often prevents
her from objectively evaluating his words and deeds. For instance, Kassell devotes
several pages (3845) to Forman’s sole publication, a pamphlet called The Groundes
of Longitude (1591), which she introduces with the dry comment that ‘It does not
contain information about how to calculate longitude’ (38). The tract is ‘self-
aggrandizing’ but evasive about the ‘secret’ that Forman claims to know, and it
attracted criticism from several knowledgeable contemporaries, including Thomas
Hood, the first Mathematical Lecturer of the City of London. Modern historians of
Tudor mathematics have dismissed it as ‘negligible’ and ‘vacuous’, but Kassell avoids
an evaluation, preferring to take Hood’s attack as revealing an ‘animosity’ between
Hood and ‘an impoverished, quasi-itinerant astrologer [which] is evidence both of the
lack of structure in the mathematical community in Elizabethan London and [of] the
possible rifts within it’ (44). But to postulate the existence of such a ‘community’
(with perhaps a dozen members) and to see Forman as belonging to it, is to beg
several historiographical questions. Kassell solemnly records Forman’s promise that
if his method for calculating longitude*whatever it was*‘was duly rewarded . . . he
would ‘‘perhaps make declaration of the principles of another science, as much
25
See A.L. Rowse, Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age (London, 1974), and Michael
MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England
(Cambridge, 1981). Mordechai Feingold has singled out the ‘sexual context’ of Forman’s dreams as
providing invaluable insights into his ‘fixation on power relations’ and his exploitation of women: ‘It is
impossible to evaluate Forman’s career without considering his incessant preying on women, for his
lucrative practice depended on the support of the numerous women he seduced*literally and figuratively’
(‘A Conjurer and a Quack?’ [note 23], 550).
140 Essay Review
desired as this’’’, commenting that Forman ‘was probably describing the secret of the
philosophers’ stone. This had been known to the ancients, then lost; but the secret of
longitude had never before been known to any man’ (4445; my italics). To forfeit
the historian’s necessary detachment from your subject is to risk sharing their
credulity. It is good to get inside Forman’s world, provided that you can get out
again.
III
Lauren Kassell’s study confines itself to the output of one man. In Promethean
Ambitions. Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, William R. Newman ranges over
a huge period of time, from the beginnings of alchemy in Hellenistic Egypt to Bacon,
Descartes, and Boyle. His goal is equally ambitious, to situate alchemy as a key
player in the debate over the relative status of art and nature in this period. As
Newman argues, alchemy’s claim to be able to effect transmutation, if accepted,
would have placed its art above nature, and destroyed both ancient and modern
conceptions of its inferiority. The book displays, once again, Newman’s wide
knowledge of medieval and early modern alchemy, together with much of the
relevant secondary literature. However, its treatment of several fundamental issues is
unsatisfying.
To begin with, Newman does not give adequate attention to the terms used in this
debate. He acknowledges a debt to the exemplary essay by A. J. Close, but his own
discussion of the concepts involved is perfunctory.26 The term ‘nature’*a notor-
iously polysemous word, which Vladimir Nabokov said should only ever be used
within inverted commas*has a long history, as several learned studies have shown,
but Newman writes as if it meant the same thing in texts covering a thousand years.27
Although Newman cites the obligatory passages in Aristotle, he seems not to have
noticed some important contextual issues.
In Physics (book two, chapter one), Aristotle stated that ‘Of things that exist,
some exist by nature, some from other causes’, namely human activity in producing
artefacts.28 The characteristic of natural things*humans, animals, plants*is that
‘each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect
of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a
bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations*i.e. in
so far as they are products of art*have no innate impulse to change’. So, Aristotle
reasons that ‘nature is a principle or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that
to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not accidentally’ (192b923).
This is the key distinction for Aristotle, which sets ‘artificial products’ apart from
things in nature: ‘None of them has in itself the principle of its own production’
(192b2930). And he concludes his discussion of this concept of nature with a
transition to a second, complementary notion: ‘This then is one account of nature,
26
A.J. Close, ‘Commonplace Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity and in the Renaissance’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969), 46786.
27
See, e.g., André Pellicier, Natura: Etude sémantique et histoire du mot latin (Paris, 1966); James A.
Weisheipl, ‘The Concept of Nature’, in W.E. Carroll (ed), Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages
(Washington, DC, 1985), 123.
28
All quotations from Aristotle are from Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. The
Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1984).
Essay Review 141
namely that it is the primary underlying matter of things which have in themselves a
principle of motion or change’. Another account is that nature is the shape or form
which is specified in the definition of the thing (193a2831). Here, Aristotle adds a
distinction between potentiality and actuality: ‘what is potentially flesh or bone has
not yet its own nature, and does not exist by nature, until it receives the form
specified in the definition . . .’ (193a36b2). This new distinction enables Aristotle to
settle the issue of primacy (which constituent part is dominant, which subordinate),
always a key process in his philosophy:
The form indeed is nature rather than the matter; for a thing is more properly
said to be what it is when it exists in actuality than when it exists potentially.
Again man is born from man but not bed from bed. (193b710)
William Newman’s exposition of this passage shows that he has not grasped the
two distinct categories which Aristotle defined (Promethean Ambitions, 16). He
quotes the point that ‘man is born from man but not bed from bed’ as if it belonged
to Aristotle’s first category, ‘nature’ as the innate principle of movement (or change),
rather than the second, where it is form, rather than matter, that determines ‘nature’.
Also, Newman fails to realize that Aristotle is not talking about ‘nature’ in general,
but about individual natures. It is a commonplace among Aristotelian scholars that
when Aristotle talks about nature, he is not talking about a single universal
force, which pervades all natural objects and directs their development and
behaviour towards goals it has appointed for them. . . . When he is writing as a
scientist or as a philosopher of science he means by nature the nature of this or
that thing. We say that a natural object, like a tree or a horse, has a nature: it is
that nature which . . . in Phys. II Aristotle is trying to get at.29
This oversight is due to Newman using the terms ‘nature’ and ‘art’ without a proper
discussion of their connotations, and as if they referred to the same unchanging
concepts throughout the period he covers. Aristotle distinguished five usages of the
word ‘nature’ (Metaphysics, 5.4, 1014b161015a31); Renaissance Aristotelians
distinguished between six and ten meanings; A. J. Close made do with seven.30 In
this context, Aristotle is using the term in Close’s sense ‘d) the essential form of
physical things, giving them life and specific identity’.31 It is a category-error to cite
this passage as if it referred to phusis in any of the other senses; similarly with technē,
for which Newman cites only one definition from Aristotle, ‘a ‘‘reasoned state of
capacity to make’’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a8), the ability to produce in a
methodical and clever way’ (Promethean Ambitions, 1415). This is too imprecise. As
Charlton pointed out, in Aristotle ‘art, like nature, is always the art of something
definite, the art of making a table or restoring men to health or the like, and is, in
fact, the form which the artist has in mind, or intends, for the material, the pieces of
wood or the patient’s body’.32 For Aristotle, technē implied that the craftsman knows
29
Aristotle’s Physics Books I and II., translated with Introduction and Notes by W. Charlton (Oxford,
1970), xvixvii. See also 51, 88.
30
Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia. Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought
(Ithaca, NY, 1996), 212, 227. See the full discussion of ‘Nature and Counternature’, 21225; Close,
‘Commonplace Theories’ (note 27), 46980.
31
Ibid., 467.
32
Charlton, Aristotle’s Physics (note 30), 90
142 Essay Review
the principles by which one can effect change in an object: ‘All art is concerned
with . . . contriving and considering how something may come into being which is
capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the
thing made . . .’ (EN 6.4, 1140b123; also MM 1.34, 1197a3ff.).33 The key question
for alchemy is, in what sense does the alchemist bring something ‘into being’
according to ‘the form which the artist . . . intends for the material’?
For Aristotle, as for the vast majority of philosophers and theologians up to the
seventeenth century who discussed this topic, the human artificer could imitate nature
but was unable to create anything having the autonomous powers of growth or
movement. However, it is possible that alchemists claimed such powers for their art
during the period when alchemy flourished in Islamic countries. At all events, in the
eleventh century Avicenna delivered what Newman judges to be ‘the most influential
attack on alchemy ever made’, starting from the Aristotelian position that ‘Art is
weaker than nature and does not overtake it, however much it labors. Therefore, let
the artificers of alchemy know that the species of metals cannot be transmuted. (Quare
sciant artifices alkimie species metallorum transmutari non posse.)’
Although alchemists can make similar things, Avicenna concedes, having the
superficial qualities of gold or silver, ‘alien qualities’ will still dominate. Using
the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, Avicenna denies the
possibility of transmutation:
I do not believe that it is possible to take away the specific differences by some
technique because it is not due to such [accidents] that one complexion is
converted into another, since these sensible things are not those by which
species are transmuted; rather they are accidents and properties. For the
differences of the metals are not known, and since the difference is not known,
how will it be possible to know whether it is removed or not, or how it could be
removed? (37)
In a parallel attack on astrology, as Newman reports, Avicenna returned to his
condemnation of alchemy ‘in more explicitly religious terms, distinguishing what
God has made by natural powers from what man can accomplish by artificial means’
(38). Christian writers agreed that the alchemists’ claims, if true, would usurp God’s
powers.
Over the next 600 years, Avicenna’s endorsement of the Aristotelian dichotomy
setting art below nature influenced countless rejections of alchemy’s claim to be able
to transmute metals, many of which cited the Latin words ‘Sciant artifices’ as if they
were the opening words of a Papal decree. Newman diligently collects denials of
alchemical transmutation by a remarkable range of thinkers, leading figures in
philosophy and theology whose works were frequently copied, often supplied with
commentaries longer than the original texts, and forming a staple part of the
university curriculum over the next 500 years. They include Averroes, Albert the
Great, Aquinas, Ibn Khaldun, together with Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and
Aristotelians of all schools. Having documented this massive consensus among
philosophers and theologians, Newman extends it to take in artists and craftsmen
33
Cf. also Met. 9.3, 1047a35ff.; EN 2.4, 1105b22ff.; Pol. 4.1, 1288b1021. On the connotations of ars by
the thirteenth century, see Michael R. McVaugh, ‘Medical Certitude at Montpellier’, Osiris, 2nd ser., 6
(1990), 6284 at 71, and Hélène Merle, ‘Ars’, Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, 28 (1986), 95133.
Essay Review 143
such as Leonardo da Vinci, Biringuccio, and Palissy, all of whom vigorously denied
alchemy’s power to effect transmutation. At this stage in his survey, however, Newman
becomes visibly dissatisfied with alchemy’s critics, and tries to subvert their arguments
by ascribing to them ulterior motives. Leonardo states, categorically enough, that
Nature is concerned with the production of elementary things. But man from
these elementary things produces an infinite number of compounds; although
he is unable to create any element except another life like himself*that is, in his
children. Old alchemists will be my witnesses, who have never either by chance
or by experiment succeeded in creating the smallest element which can be
created by nature . . .34
Newman attempts to relativize*and hence discount*Leonardo’s objections as those

of a painter worried that alchemy might be challenging his own art’s status as the
supreme imitator of nature and, moreover, appealing to the same patrons
(11825). But there is no evidence that Leonardo held the purely personal, self-
centred attitudes that Newman ascribes to him. Similarly, when Biringuccio
sarcastically suggests that, if alchemists really could make gold, there would be no
point in studying anything else, Newman attempts to deflect the criticism by taking
this as serious evidence for ‘the competition between alchemy and the other arts’,
which, he claims, was rife in the Renaissance (129). As for Palissy, Newman
acknowledges that he ‘debunks [alchemy] at considerable length’ (14563, 196), but
once again alleges ulterior motives, describing Palissy’s diatribe as the utterance of an
‘artist in competition with a rival discipline’ (147). Newman will not accept that these
critics of alchemy were expressing in their own terms the widely shared disapproval of
the art; each is said to act out of narrow self-interest. Newman even tries to turn the
tables on Palissy, arguing that he actually tried to appropriate ‘the alchemists’ own
goals’ by following out an obsession with ‘the theme of flesh becoming stone’ (145,
153). Newman takes Palissy’s interest in fossils and petrifaction*he was a pioneer in
ceramic techniques*as proving ‘his full debt to Geber’s theory of transmutation’
(16162). This attempt to expose Palissy as a covert alchemist seems to me to lack any
substance, and I was dismayed to find that Newman tries to turn to alchemy’s
advantage the joke that Palissy made on his deathbed, giving a friend ‘‘‘a stone that he
called his ‘philosophers’ stone’ . . . [namely] a skull (teste de mort), which the passage
of time had converted into stone . . .’’’ (160). Unwilling to read this as ‘a sardonic
thrust at the summum bonum of the alchemists’, Newman seriously suggests that the
petrifacted skull represents ‘the transmutational summum bonum of nature’, and that
‘Palissy was substituting one artistic goal for another’, leaving behind ‘an alchemical
memento mori’ (162). Such special pleading diminishes the reader’s trust in an author.
As for the Aristotelian position regarding the superiority of nature, and the
inferiority of all the arts, including alchemy, earlier Newman accused Averroes and
Avicenna of having
adopted the unbending axiom that man and nature cannot produce the same
effects. The problematic nature of this claim would become ever more apparent
in the following centuries as the proponents of alchemy forced their detractors
to consider the empirical consequences of their overconfident assertion. (43)
34
Irma A. Richter (ed.), Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford, 1952), 10.
144 Essay Review
But this is the scenario for a confrontation that never took place. Newman cites no
evidence that the critics of alchemy were ever ‘forced’ to reconsider their belief that
nature was stronger than art. None of them felt the need to respond to alchemy’s
apologists, who brought no new and compelling arguments to bear. For the most part,
these two discourses, for and against alchemy, existed on two separate planes,
addressed to two different audiences, one very much larger than the other. Newman
talks up the apologists’ utterances as if they seriously challenged the deep-rooted and
almost universal belief in the superiority of nature to art. According to Newman, the
alchemical apologists successfully challenged the Aristotelian-Avicennan ‘stark
distinction’ (17, 112), or ‘hard distinction between the artificial and the natural’ (93),
those philosophers’ ‘hard-line assertion that natural and artificial products are
fundamentally and essentially distinct’ (9697, my italics). Although Newman
attempts to disvalue the Aristotelian-Avicennan position, he cites no evidence that
any such challenge took place. Newman gradually slips into the role of a defender of
alchemy, wielding a hammer against its critics. Outspoken opponents of alchemy, such
as Nicholas Eymerich or Thomas Erastus, are demonized.35 On one page, Erastus is
said to represent ‘the culmination of the tradition’ deriving from Avicenna which
‘began by limiting the transmutation of species to God’, but two pages later he is found
guilty of having ‘advocated a startling rift between the worlds of the artificial and the
natural’ (111, 113; my italics).
Despite his many scholarly qualities, William Newman emerges as an apologist
for alchemy, not just its historian. Like many partisan observers, he tends to privilege
his subject, exempt it from critical evaluation, while disparaging its detractors. He
discusses some of the alchemists’ counter-claims, but piecemeal, without evaluating
their arguments and without attempting to reconstruct the social and economic
factors which put alchemy on the defensive. Rather, he dramatizes the alchemists’
self-justifications and applauds their campaign. Newman attaches considerable
significance to a little-known thirteenth-century alchemical treatise, The Book of
Hermes.36 The author of this treatise denied the inferiority of art to nature, asserting
that ‘human works are variously the same as natural ones. . . . For the fire of natural
lightning and the fire thrown forth by a stone is the same fire’. Newman comments
approvingly that his author’s objection ‘cuts to the very quick of any hard distinction
between the artificial and the natural based on Aristotelian categories. Who could
deny that the fire started by striking two flints was the same as the fire started by
lightning in a blazing forest?’ According to Newman, ‘to admit that the fire produced
was the same . . . meant that man could transmute elements in the same way as
nature’, but a huge gulf separates those two activities (64). The Hermetic writer’s
rather feeble argument fails to address the issues central to Avicenna’s neo-
Platonizing system, the principle that substantial forms cannot be transformed by
human intervention.
35
Newman ascribes to Eymerich ‘a visceral antipathy to alchemy’ (94), although Newman shows that he
merely echoed Aristotle and Aquinas; he is at once ‘extremely conservative’ and ‘intransigent’.
36
According to Newman, this treatise had ‘never been printed, or for that matter analyzed’ until he
produced a ‘partial working edition’ in his doctoral dissertation (Harvard, MA, 1968). Indeed, it was
‘[un]known to the three Scholastic authors of the mid-thirteenth century most concerned with alchemy,
Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon’; William R. Newman, ‘Technology and
Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages’, Isis, 80 (1989), 42345 at 430. However, it is quite well known
to modern historians of alchemy.
Essay Review 145
William Newman exudes energy and verve, but his history of medieval alchemy is
one-sided, an affair of heroes and villains. It is instructive to compare Newman’s
heavily polarized account of medieval alchemy with the more sober scholarly studies
of Barbara Obrist (who was trained as an art historian before turning to the medieval
sciences). She has produced a valuable edition of Constantine of Pisa’s Liber
secretorum alchimie and an outstanding study of alchemical imagery.37 She has also
published a series of substantial essays on art and nature in medieval alchemy, its use
of analogy and its place in medieval society.38 By contrast with Newman, Obrist’s
work has no parti pris for or against her subject, and is aware of alchemy’s wider
economic and social contexts. Her starting point is alchemy’s status in the twelfth
century as an ars, occupying an intermediary place between scientia, the ‘knowledge
of causes’ or of certain truth drawn deductively from established principles, and

operatio, the craftsman’s manual labour, based on experientia (1996, 21920; 1986,
4042). Alchemy’s domain was the imitation of precious metals, precious stones, the
preparation of pharmaceutical products, and the distillation of alcohol or ‘eau-de-
vie’. The history of alchemy over the next two centuries, in her reading, might be
summarized as ‘artisanal practice in search of a theory’, especially one to justify its
claim to be able to effect transmutation. Where Newman’s history is text-based,
Obrist’s recognizes that the rise of alchemy was linked to the general economic
upswing in the thirteenth century, and suffered from later recessions (1996, 22324,
281; 1986, 4041, 4849). She never forgets that the alchemists’ claims to produce
artificial gold were constantly being tested, and exposed as illusory (1996, 226; 1993,
52). One particularly damaging failure was that described by Albert the Great in his
Mineralogy (c.1260), where, having outlined a number of theories which would
support the possibility of transmutation, he recorded that his considerable experience
with alchemists had convinced him that although they can produce a yellow-coloured
metal, it does not survive testing by fire, as he discovered himself (1996, 26769). The
failure of Albert’s experiments discredited alchemical theory, which in any case
suffered under the problematic relationship in the medieval sciences between theory
and practice (1996, 285). The fact that the artisanal practice of alchemy used a great
number of varied techniques exposed the arbitrary relation between alchemical
operations and the theories supposed to explain them. ‘Thus alchemy presented an
exemplary instance of the more general problem in medieval science, the gulf between
rational demonstration and the results of experience’ (1993, 5253). These all too
public failures, and some deliberate deceptions, resulted in the widely shared view of
alchemists as charlatans and frauds (1996, 216; 1993, 54). Another socio-economic
context which proved unfavourable to alchemy was the monetary crisis of the
thirteenth century, in which some rulers desperately hired alchemists in the hope of
them making artificial gold to fill their empty coffers (1986, 4953, 5658). Both the
rulers’ expectation, and its failure, served to discredit alchemy further. Several
37
Constantine of Pisa: The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy (Leiden, Netherlands, 1990); Les débuts de
l’imagerie alchimique (14e15e siècles) (Paris, 1982).
38
Barbara Obrist,‘Art et nature dans l’alchimie médiévale’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences, 49 (1996),
21586; ‘Les rapports d’analogie entre philosophie et alchimie médiévale’, in Alchimie et Philosophie à la
Reniassance, edited by J.-C. Margolin and S. Matton (Paris, 1993), 4464; ‘Die Alchemie in der
mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft’, in Die Alchemie in der europäischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte,
edited by Christoph Meinel (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1986), 3359; ‘Vers une histoire de l’alchimie
médiévale’, Micrologus, 3 (1995), 343. I refer to these essays by their publication date, thus ‘1996, 220’. All
translations are mine.
146 Essay Review
monastic orders between 1270 and 1300 prohibited it, and in 1317 Pope John XXII
issued his famous decree denouncing alchemy as a counterfeiting art (1986, 5153).
In Obrist’s view, alchemy’s negative public image was a major reason why it failed
to achieve the status of a scientia, and never established itself as a university discipline
(1986, 4546; 1993, 54; 1995, 4243). In terms of its self-presentation, the other major
obstacle was the universal agreement, stretching back to the Greeks, of the inferiority
of art to nature (1996, 221). Apologists for alchemy tried to overcome this obstacle
but never succeeded, resulting in what Obrist described as ‘l’échec d’alchimie’ (1993,
54; 1996, 25859), its ‘blocage épistémologique’ (1993, 55), and a ‘Stillstand der
Theorie’ (1986, 52). Unlike medicine, an ars which gained acceptance as a scientia,
alchemy failed to achieve respectability.
Viewed as a whole, medieval alchemy presents itself as an art which incessantly

attempted to establish its place in relation to nature without ever achieving a lasting
success, never managing to set up a solid relationship with natural philosophy (of
which it was, in principle, a subaltern and practical branch, on the same level as
agriculture and medicine). However, despite what appears as a permanent defeat in
the historian’s long view, alchemy persisted in its effort to build up its theoretical
bases (1996, 225).
Drawing on a wide knowledge of medieval philosophy, and a historian’s proper
detachment towards the art and its apologists, Obrist has shown how alchemists
desperately searched for plausible arguments to support the possibility of transmuta-
tion. As she puts it:
the authors of alchemical texts used all possible arguments which would
provide a theoretical foundation for their activity, in the first instance at the
level of matter and its natural transformations. In a veritable merry-go-round,
they adopt theories, eventually modifying them, but suddenly rejecting them
again. (1995, 34)
Diverse philosophical schools were brought into the frame: Pre-Socratic
cosmologies, Arabic neo-Platonism, Stoic theories of spiritus, elements from Galenic
medicine (1993, 43, 53, 63; 1996, 251). Late-thirteenth-century alchemical texts are
characterized by ‘a proliferation of models attempting to account for transmutation’.
But, ‘rather than submitting the problematical general theories to a real critique . . .
they simply superimpose others on them’ (1993, 55). Not only the theories, but also
the materials to be used, were multiplied.
One direction alchemical theory took in these attempts at legitimization was to
introduce analogies between the mineral and the animal realms, with metals
conceived of being ‘generated’ or ‘maturing’ both naturally and artificially (1993,
4752). However, analogy often collapsed into identity, as noted elsewhere in the
occult sciences.39 Another strategy adopted by alchemists was to invoke ‘occult
causes’, invisible and unknowable, or to claim that their texts were intentionally
obscure and could not be understood by laymen (1993, 54; 1995, 3840). Another
way out of the impasse between theory and practice was to give a religious dimension
to alchemy, as in the Margarita pretiosa novella (1330/40) by the physician Petrus
39
See Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 15801680’, in
Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, edited by Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1984, 2005),
95163.
Essay Review 147
Bonus of Ferrara and the works ascribed to Arnald of Villanova (1993, 5658), a
religious reinterpretation which continued down to the Trinitarian treatises of the
early fifteenth century (1995, 3536).
Where William Newman presents the alchemists’ attempts to discover a theory
legitimizing transmutation as a series of successful challenges which ‘cut to the quick’
of the dominant paradigm of art’s inferiority to nature, Barbara Obrist gives a more
dispassionate analysis of the proliferation of transmutational theories in the
thirteenth century. Where Newman was content to pick out a few of the alchemists’
utterances for his polarized history of conflicting theoretical camps, Obrist’s more
searching analysis shows how alchemists reached these positions, and at what
philosophical cost. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s principle that changes
effected by a technē are due to the intention of the artificer, regarded art and nature
as mutually exclusive categories (1996, 22728). Another Aristotelian principle,
according to which the celestial sphere is formed of an incorruptible substance, ether,
while everything below the moon is subject to change and decay, resulted in a
conceptual distinction between an upper and a lower nature. Alchemy’s field of
action was restricted to the level of an inferior nature, that of mutable bodies, but
alchemists tried to turn that restriction to their own advantage by arguing that their
art could work on matter which was not fully formed, whether materia propinqua or
inchoatio formae (1996, 23649). Alchemy re-inscribed itself as the ‘servant’ of this
lower nature, claiming the power of stimulating it to accelerate natural processes, or
to complete them. Alchemists believed that they could do this by ‘applying just the
right proportion of heat’, as Albertus Magnus advised, the ‘moderate heating used by
the alchemical art’, as a pseudo-Avicennan treatise put it in the early 13th century
(1996, 25051). But what is ‘just the right proportion of heat’? These treatises soon go
into detail: as Obrist says, ‘the ease with which authors of alchemical texts move from
the philosophical level to directions for operation is always rather disconcerting’
(1996, 247). Alchemists looking for a theoretical justification for their claim to effect
transmutation seem often happier returning to the level of operatio.
At the philosophical level, however, the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘nature’ were having
to support an ever greater weight of significance. The concept of the alchemical art as
the instrument of nature placed alchemy in a passive role (1996, 23941). In their
counter-attack, claiming that their art could prepare matter to receive form,
alchemists were giving themselves an active role (1996, 24142, 24647). But then, if
alchemy assumes the role of a stimulating agens, it must necessarily act on a patiens:
which in this case is nature, now at one and the same time both a material and
passive principle and a formal and active principle. From this viewpoint nature
is not only the object of the transformations brought about by art, but also the
instrument. The elementary active principles which are at first the instruments
of nature, seen as an organizing intelligence acting towards a goal, become
equally the instruments of human art. (1996, 252)
As Obrist puts it, ‘from the moment that the human artisan substitutes himself for a
natural agent in the manipulation of natural virtues, these become the instruments of
art, and, by extension, nature itself becomes ‘‘the instrument of art’’’, a formula
‘which represents an inversion of the long tradition by which art is the instrument of
nature’ (1996, 25253).
On Obrist’s dispassionate analysis of this development, documented with
exemplary clarity, alchemical theory had reached a state of conceptual muddle,
148 Essay Review
with art being simultaneously ‘outside’ and ‘within’ nature, ‘at once its agent and its
instrument’. For the practising alchemist seeking a theoretical justification for his
continuing efforts to discover the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixir, such considera-
tions were of small account. But for modern historians of alchemy, they should give
cause for concern, and not be used, without evaluation, to construct a triumphalist
narrative. The ‘rhetorical subtlety’ of these texts, as Obrist describes them, allowed
some alchemists to place their art on an equal footing with nature, but on tenuous
grounds. Others held that alchemy was superior to nature, able to transform it, a
claim which, for some authors, could be made by simply changing a manuscript
reading in the text they were using from imitare to mutare (1996, 25455). The co-
existence in the thirteenth century of so many diverse theories of matter provided

alchemists with a large fund of what seemed to them legitimizing arguments. Yet,
Obrist concludes, ‘no theory of the transmutation of metals, however easily
assembled, managed to acquire the status of an authority and to establish itself in
a lasting form’ (1996, 258). Meanwhile, the alchemists’ continuing failure to effect
transmutation, and their increasing association in the public eye with fraud and
deceit, meant that the art never achieved intellectual respectability.
Newman’s treatment of disputed issues in medieval alchemy is more selective and
far more dramatic than Obrist’s, making eye-catching claims for alchemy’s status
within medieval thought which cannot hold up under scrutiny. A striking instance of
this tendency is his treatment of the philosophical-theological tradition, in the
Middle Ages and after, which discussed alchemy in connection with witches and
demons. According to Newman, Albertus Magnus represents ‘a Scholastic tradition
of using alchemy to determine the powers of demons’ (44). For Albert, apparently,
‘the claim of alchemy to transmute species represents the ultimate assertion of
human power in the natural world. Alchemy is the benchmark against which other
arts*even the arts possessed by demons*must be measured’ (45). Many readers will
be surprised at these statements. Newman bases them on a section in Albert’s
commentary on the Sentences of Peter of Lombard, discussing the question ‘whether
demons can introduce substantial forms in transmuted bodes’. Albert replies in the
negative: since ‘art does not transmute a substantial form into [another substantial]
form’, therefore ‘demons cannot [transmute them], because they work only by means
of art’ (46). Then, in typical scholastic fashion, Albert considers the other side of the
case, arguing ‘it seems that if the power of art worked in the transmutations of bodies,
as in alchemy, that demons would be able to do this much more powerfully’ (47).40
This utterance is what linguists call a ‘counterfactual’, introduced by the word ‘if’,
and casting the verb into the conditional. Newman, however, removes all doubts or
conditions, declaring that Albert
takes it as a given that alchemy can indeed transmute species and works outward
from that point. If man can actually transmute species, it follows that demons,
who are much more powerful than man, can also do so. The implicit assumption
behind this use of alchemy is absolutely clear. In terms of its claims, alchemy is
the summum bonum of the human arts. As the apex of human artistry, alchemy
serves as the high-water mark against which demonic power must be measured.
40
The Latin text reads: ‘ergo videtur, quod si potestas artis operetur super corporum transmutationes, ut
alchimiae, quod daemones hoc multo magis vacere praevaleant’ (47 note).
Essay Review 149
This use of alchemy as the symbol of man’s ability to alter the natural world
would have far-reaching consequences. (47; my italics)
But Albert’s formulation in no way permits this degree of certainty, even though
Newman insistently repeats his point (49, 5153, 5455, 61, 63, 101, 118, etc.). It
seems to me a major distortion of Scholasticism to argue that medieval theologians
like Albertus Magnus or Aquinas saw alchemy as ‘the paragon of human artifice’,
‘the touchstone by which all arts . . . are measured’, ‘the apex of the arts in its
relationship to nature’ or ‘the apex of human endeavours in the realm of artisanship’
(49, 51, 5253, 63). I would argue that medieval theologians considering whether
demons could change their shapes legitimately looked to alchemy for an analogy,
since it claimed to be able to transmute metals. However, this ‘shape-changing’

analogy says nothing about the status of alchemy among the other artes, a question
which could only be settled by a comparative analysis of the medieval arts system,
from the trivium and quadrivium to the practical arts, a discussion which Newman
does not undertake. It is not my impression that alchemy enjoyed such a supreme
status in the medieval philosophical world.41 I am not persuaded by Newman’s
claims that, in the thirteenth century, ‘the field [of alchemy] was gradually
appropriated by Scholastic authors’ or that ‘most scholastics thought that art could
perfect nature by applying agents to patients’ (43, 116). Newman ascribes to ‘the
great theologians’ of the thirteenth century the belief that ‘alchemy’s claim of
effecting the rapid transmutation of bodies made it unique among the arts’ (112). But
since Albertus Magnus and Aquinas had both denied those claims, alchemy’s
‘uniqueness’ in their eyes may have been of a rather different kind. Newman argues
that ‘although alchemy was not an official subject of the medieval university’,
nevertheless some texts in this period are organized along Scholastic lines, with
arguments contra followed by arguments pro (4547, etc.). But it would be surprising
if alchemical texts did not show some influence of Scholasticism, just as those did in
poetics. By frequent repetition of the terms ‘Geberian’ and ‘Scholastic’, Newman
gives the impression that the tradition of ‘Geberian alchemy’ formed a coherent
strand in Scholasticism, resisting ‘Thomistic opponents of alchemy’. Only towards
the end of his book does he concede that this ‘was by no means the exclusive
Scholastic view’, and that ‘It is not the case . . . that Scholasticism in general followed
the example of Geber’ (278).42 This concession comes as a surprise after the very
definite terms used previously.
William Newman gets so carried away by his energy and self-conviction that the
reader who wishes to form a balanced judgement needs to preserve a certain sceptical
detachment. This is nowhere more necessary than when reading the especially
ambitious chapter in Promethean Ambitions devoted to ‘Artificial Life and the
Homunculus’ which discusses the varied traditions describing how a ‘little man’
could be made by artificial means (164237). This tradition already existed in Arabic
41
Two recent wide-ranging handbooks have each only a single mention of alchemy: see The Cambridge
History of Later Medieval Philosophy, edited by N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (Cambridge,
1982), 506*one reference only in a volume of 1,000 pages; and none at all in The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval Philosophy, edited by A.S. McGrade (Cambridge, 2003).
42
Elsewhere, Newman has written that ‘alchemical writers, unlike those in the mainstream of the
Scholastic tradition, were willing to argue that human art, even if it learned by imitating natural processes,
could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them’: Newman ‘Technology and
Alchemical Debate’ (note 37) (my italics).
150 Essay Review
alchemy, as Paul Kraus showed, and achieved a limited currency in the Latin Middle
Ages.43 One account appeared in an obscure treatise published in 1508 by the
theologian, Alonso Tostado, describing an experiment purportedly carried out by
Arnald of Villanova (d. 1311), to whom many alchemical works were spuriously
ascribed (8990). Alonso claims that the alchemist
preserved male semen in an artificially constructed vessel for some days,
together with certain transmutative drugs . . . Finally, after some days, many
transmutations having occurred, a human body was formed out of it, but not
perfectly organized. For Arnald did not wait further, breaking that vessel
with the already-formed semen, lest he seem to tempt God, [and] wondering
whether God might infuse a rational soul into that conceived [homunculus].
(19293)
Newman does not comment on the solecism ‘already-formed semen’. Whatever the
reception of this anecdote, some connection of alchemy with the possibility of
creating life artificially must have been made before Paracelsus, for Newman quotes
(in a different chapter) Biringuccio’s denunciation in 1540 of the alchemists’ apparent
claims that they can, ‘even outside a woman’s body . . . generate and form a man or
any other animal with flesh, bones, and sinews, and to animate him with a spirit and
every other attribute that he requires’ (130).
Paracelsus’ name enters the story with a treatise called Die 9 Bücher de natura
rerum, published by Samuel Appiarius in his Metamorphosis (Basel, 1572), with a
Preface subscribed ‘Villach 1537’.44 Newman records that Karl Sudhoff, the great
Paracelsus editor, rejected it as spurious, but that some recent scholars see it as
perhaps a disciple’s work, partly based on Paracelsian ideas (199). The treatise
describes various marvels, including women having intercourse with animals and
producing monstrous offspring (202); a process by which menstrual blood, sealed in a
flask and heated in ‘a horse’s womb’*the venter equinus, ‘a technical term in
alchemy for decaying dung used as a heat source, to mean any low source of
incubating heat’ (215)*will produce the basilisk, an artificial monster able to kill
with a glance, since it has been made of a woman’s ‘poisonous excrescence’ (202); and
what Newman describes as a ‘quaint experiment’ by which a snake is cut in pieces
and allowed to putrefy in ‘a horse’s womb’. The pieces, we are assured, ‘will all turn
to little worms like frog spawn’, and ‘one snake becomes a hundred snakes’, each as
big as the first (206). As the experienced scholar knows, such recipes are found in
books of alchemy and magic stretching back to Hellenistic Egypt, and are
far removed from those aspects of Paracelsus’ work which once attracted respect
from such scholars as Walter Pagel and Charles Webster.45 The author of this
43
Jabir ibn Hayyan, 11934, discussing the Arabic texts and their putative Greek sources.
44
See K. Sudhoff (ed.), Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke. I. Abteilung. Medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche
und philosophische Schriften, 14 vols (Munich-Berlin, 19221933).
45
See, e.g., Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the
Renaissance (Basel, 1958); Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton. Magic and the Making of Modern
Science (Cambridge, 1982). Yet the rehabilitation of Paracelsus as a precursor of the Scientific Revolution
was achieved at the cost of denying the fundamental ambiguities in his work, his many debts to medieval
sources, and the incoherence of his writing. For a valuable corrective, see Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus.
Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany, NY, 1997), who shows the extent to
which Paracelsus’ ideas concerning medicine (also alchemy, astrology, and what he called ‘anatomy’) derive
from his religious world view. Practising ‘a text-centred historicism’ (xii), Weeks reconstructs the doctrinal
and socio-political upheavals through which Paracelsus lived, and chronicles his intellectual career in terms
Essay Review 151
pseudo-Paracelsian treatise gives what Newman describes as ‘a lengthy description of

the homunculus and its mode of generation’:
We must now by no means forget the generation of homunculi. For there is
something to it, although it has been kept in great secrecy and kept hidden up
to now, and there was not a little doubt and question among the old
philosophers whether it even be possible to nature and art that a man can be
born outside the female body and [without] a natural mother. I give this
answer*that it is by no means opposed to the spagyric art and to nature, but
that it is indeed possible. But how this should happen and proceed*its process
is thus*that the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a cucurbit for forty
days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb, or at least so

long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed.
After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a
body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the arcanum of human blood and be
nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s
womb, a living child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child,
which is born of a woman, but much smaller.46 (203204)
As for the strange claim that, after 40 days, the semen ‘will look somewhat like a man,
but . . . without a body’, Newman claims that the homunculus represents ‘the distilled
essence of masculinity. . . . Because of its freedom from the gross materiality of
the female, the homunculus is translucent and practically bodiless’ (204). But this is to
misunderstand the antithesis in the German text between a creature supposedly
made in a test tube, and a child born in the normal course of nature, from a woman’s
of a ‘transferral of his religious speculations to nature and medicine’ (105), drawing especially on
eschatology (7375), logos mysticism (112, 17879), the Pauline concept of love (140, 176), Mariology
(7983, 8889), Trinitarian ideas (8085, 118, 14647, 14951), and above all the divine image (11128).
46
The full German text reads as follows:
Nun ist aber auch die generation der homunculi in keinen weg zu vergessen. dan etwas ist daran,
wiewol solches bisher in grosser heimlikeit und gar verborgen ist gehalten worden und nit ein
kleiner zweifel und frag under etlichen der alten philosophis gewesen, ob auch der natur und kunst
möglich sei, das ein mensch ausserthalben weiblichs leibs und einer natürlichen muter möge
geboren werden? darauf gib ich die antwort das es der kunst spagirica und der natur in keinem weg
zuwider, sonder gar wol möglich sei. wie aber solches zugang und geschehen möge, ist nun sein
process also, nemlich das der sperma eines mans in verschlossnen cucurbiten per se mit der
höchsten putrefaction, ventre equino, putreficirt werde auf 40 tag oder so lang bis er lebendig werde
und sich beweg und rege, welchs leichtlich zu sehen ist. nach solcher zeit wird es etlicher massen
einem menschen gleich sehen, doch durchsichtig on ein corpus. so er nun nach disem reglich mit
dem arcano sanguinis humani gar weislich gespeiset und erneret wird bis auf 40 wochen und in
steter gleicher werme ventris equini erhalten, wird ein recht lebendig menschlich kint daraus mit
allen glitmassen wie ein ander kint, das von einem weib geboren wird, doch vil kleiner. dasselbig wir
ein homunculum nennen und sol hernach nit anders als ein anders kind mit grossem fleiss und sorg
auferzogen werden, bis es zu seinen tagen und verstant kompt. das ist nun der aller höchsten und
grössesten heimlikeiten eine, die got den tötlichen und sündigen menschen hat wissen lassen. dan es
ist ein mirakel und magnale dei und ein geheimnis uber alle geheimnus, sol auch bilich ein
geheimnus bleiben bis zu den aler lesten zeiten, da dan nichts verborgen wird bleiben sonder alles
offenbaret werden.
Sudhoff, Paracelsus (note 45), 11.31617. Newman does not quote the two concluding sentences,
occluding the religious context in which this author places the homunculus, a miracle or magnale Dei,
whose secret will only be revealed on the Day of Judgement.
152 Essay Review
womb. At all events, Newman reassures his readers that ‘the reasoning here is
straightforward’.
Readers may wonder why Newman devotes so much serious discussion to
pseudo-Paracelsus’ do-it-yourself recipe for making a homunculus, especially when he
knows that a genuine Paracelsian tract exists on this topic, De homunculis (c.1529
1532). In it, however, the real Paracelsus demonstrated a totally different attitude
towards this creature. In an indignant diatribe, Paracelsus denounced men who are
unable to control their sexuality, for their lust will produce semen which, should it fall
‘on a Digestif*that is, a warm, moist subject that can act as an incubator . . . must
produce a monster or homunculus when it is ‘‘digested’’’ (21718). In this authentic
tract, Paracelsus singled out sodomy for a separate attack, warning that anal
intercourse can produce ‘intestinal homunculi’, and that those who swallow semen
can even generate homunculi in their throat (218). Paracelsus’ remedy was that young
men should either get married or be castrated, practising a self-imposed chastity, so
that they do not become, as Newman solemnly puts it, ‘the involuntary begetter of
homunculi’ (21920).
This is indeed an extreme remedy, but Newman has an extreme explanation for it,
applying his ‘ulterior motives’ tactic in the most sensational manner. In 1990, a team
of Austrian forensic specialists opened Paracelsus’ grave and subjected the bones
contained in it to ‘intensive metric and chemical analysis’ (196). They found that the
skeleton’s pelvis*if indeed they were examining Paracelsus’ pelvis*was ‘extraordi-
narily wide’, from which they concluded that ‘Paracelsus was either a genetic male
afflicted with pseudo-hermaphroditism or a genetic female suffering from androgen-
ital syndrome’ (197).47 Although Newman disavows any intention to ‘develop an
elaborate psychosexual theory in order to explain Paracelsus’ behaviour’ (199; my
italics), he feels no compunction in using it to explain Paracelsus’ writings. He argues
that ‘an extreme ambivalence to sexuality . . . surfaces in his own discussion of the
homunculus. To ignore the evidence of his own probable sexual disorder would
therefore be a matter of scholarly negligence’ (199). This transparent self-serving
claim to scholarly probity may be discounted.
Newman has thus constructed the following argument:
1. Pseudo-Paracelsus described the alchemical homunculus favourably.
2. The real Paracelsus denounced homunculi as the product of unnatural lust.
3. The examination of what purports to be Paracelsus’ skeleton suggests that he
was a hermaphrodite.
47
Paracelsus’ bones have been disturbed more than once. As Walther Auwe recorded, in a note not cited
by Newman, ‘Über den Schädel des Paracelsus von Hohenheim’, Die Pharmazie 5 (1950), 61415, they
were removed from the graveyard of the St. Sebastianskirche, Salzburg, in the mid-eighteenth century, and
placed in the church vestry, in a marble pyramid monument, behind locked doors. Interested visitors,
however, especially doctors, could see them, and in 1819, the Hofrath Osiander was given permission to
handle the skull and the bones. Examining them, he was struck by the delicacy of the bone structure and
exclaimed that, ‘were he not convinced that these bones had not been exchanged for those of another
skeleton, he would consider both the skull and the bones to be those of a woman’ (my translation).
Osiander made further measurements of male and female skulls, strengthening his diagnosis, and felt it to
be confirmed when he read accounts of Paracelsus’ life, according to which, when three years old, a pig bit
off his genitals. So, Awe commented, just as animals castrated early in life develop feminine features, and
castrati develop a woman’s oval face and more delicate neck, it is not surprising that Paracelsus’ bone
structure should have become female. And, according to a French historian of medicine, Paracelsus’
castration would account for his misogyny. At this point, the sceptical reader may enquire, are we sure that
these are Paracelsus’ bones?
Essay Review 153
4. Therefore, Paracelsus’ ‘ambivalent sexuality’ explains his opposition to

alchemical homunculi.
This is the most remarkable instance of Newman’s tactic of devaluing critics of
alchemy by accusing them of having ulterior motives, or some personal animus
against the art. But this is also the most feeble instance, based on the collocation of a
spurious with a genuine tract by Paracelsus, as if they represented two psychological
sides of the same writer, and relying on the questionable results of a forensic
examination 450 years after the subject’s death in order to diagnose him as (perhaps)
‘suffering from a massive sexual dysfunction’ which would account for his
‘ambivalent sexuality’ (221). (Even accepting this deduction, Paracelsus’ attitude to
what was regarded as ‘unnatural’ sexuality by the standards of his and every other
age until our own, was not ‘ambivalent’ but a clear-cut denunciation; and I know of
no evidence that being a hermaphrodite would necessarily affect one’s attitude to
sex.) But the most glaring hole in this argument is that, in the texts so diligently cited
by Newman, Paracelsus never referred to the alchemical homunculus. The De natura
rerum, ‘whether genuine or not’, as Newman finally describes it, did so, but
Paracelsus did not (222). When the reader realizes that this is the case, they may well
feel that Professor Newman has been wasting their time. It may have been legitimate
to discuss pseudo-Paracelsus, but the man himself should have been left in peace,
bones and all.
Newman chose to discuss the homunculus presumably because it represented the
alchemists’ most grandiose ‘quest’, as he calls it, greater than those for the
Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixir Vitae, namely to acquire a God-like ability to
create life. To round out his treatment of this matter, Newman surveys reactions to
the pseudo-Paracelsian and other alchemical writings that claimed this ability.
Unfortunately for the credibility of its proponents, a distinguished group of early
modern scholars rejected their claims, including the Jesuits Martinus del Rio and
Athanasius Kircher, the Minim friar Marin Mersenne, the Cambridge Platonist
Henry More, and the aristocratic Margaret Cavendish (22226). All were quite sure
that such claims far exceeded the limits of alchemy and that, in Cavendish’s words,
‘though the Arts of Men . . . are very fine and profitable, yet they are nothing in
comparison to Natures works . . .’ (225). Newman also cites Francis Bacon’s
insistence48 that, in the experiments he described for heating substances in close
containers, he did not ‘aim at the making of Paracelsus’ pygmies, or any such
prodigious follies’ (264). However, Newman fails to note a number of important
rejections of the pseudo-Paracelsian homunculus. Although he gives considerable
space to Daniel Sennert, ‘the famous medical professor of Wittenberg’, citing his use
of alchemical ideas, Newman does not record that Sennert was a vociferous critic of
Paracelsus for espousing magic and vitalism, and for misusing analogy.49 In
particular, Sennert criticized the claim to be able to create a homunculus: Paraclesus
48
Sylva Sylvarum, i.99, in Works, edited by J. Spedding et al., 14 vols (London, 185774), 2.38283. See
similar comments in Historia Densi et Rari, Works, 5.36869. Once again, Newman hopes that his ulterior
motives tactic will discredit alchemy’s critics, claiming that Bacon was ‘back-peddling’ here, drawing back
from an ‘overly close association with the chymists’, and ‘nervously extracting himself fromthe possible
imputation of making a homunculus’ (26364). But the experiments Bacon describes on wood and water
are quite different, designed to see whether simple bodies can be turned into compound bodies by heating.
49
See Promethean Ambitions, 102103, 25055, 27375, 28182, 289, 300.
154 Essay Review
‘wrote not only absurd but wicked things, showing how a little man may be made by
Chymistry without a Father or Mother, and saith it is not a great secret’.50 Another
equally forthright rebuttal that Newman does not cite was made in 1599 by the
English Aristotelian, John Case:
Let the Paracelsians be silent and no longer impudently boast that they can
produce natural things directly by their art without any natural thing having
been made use of! Certainly, the wondrous oracles*or rather the sophisms of
their art*brag that without any doubt they can impart animating and vital
motions and powers into metals, stones, and all inanimate objects! Thus (how
one trembles to say it) they brag that they can procreate a man merely by the
chemical art without the mating of male and female!51

For Case, the homunculus was ‘a prime example of the illegitimate application of art
and a misuse of it against nature’. Charles Schmitt described the homunculus as ‘one
of the most vulnerable of the Paracelsian doctrines’, a ‘bizarre teaching’ which, until
that point, had been silently passed over by ‘those interpreters of Paracelsianism who
emphasize the fruitful and progressive aspects of the tradition vis-à-vis modern
thought’ (21213). Now, however, William Newman cites it alongside references to
‘bioethics’, ‘organotherapy’, ‘the current debate about employing cloned fetal tissue
for medical purposes’, ‘in vitro fertilization’, ‘bioengineering’, ‘human cloning’, and
‘ectogenesis’ (17, 10, 18790, 19394, 23637, 302304). Many readers will reject
such glib parallels.52
Newman’s diligent survey did throw up a few defendants of the ‘pseudo-
Paracelsian’ homunculus, but they are hardly convincing. ‘In 1672 Johann
Hannemann, a medical professor at Kiel, claimed that a worthy theologian had
been an ocular witness of a homunculus produced by chymistry. Other acquaintances
of Hannemann’s had also seen and handled such homunculi’ (227; my italics).
Second- or third-hand reports carry little conviction, on any scale of evidence. In
1660, the Leipzig writer Johann Praetorius published Anthropodemus plutonicus: Das
ist eine neue Weltbeschreibung von allerley wunderbahren Menschen, which includes ‘a
long section on ‘‘chymical people’’, that is to say homunculi, in the company of
‘‘dragon children’’, ‘‘air people’’, mandrakes, giants, and dwarves, to name but a few
members of this teratological fraternity’ (229). No one could place such a witness in
the same scale as Mersenne, Kircher, or John Case.
Impressive though William Newman’s achievements are as a historian, as an
apologist for alchemy he cuts a different picture. He tends to treat all alchemists’
pronouncements with respect and a suspension of disbelief, while convicting their
critics of vested interests, professional rivalry, or, in the case of Paracelsus, a sexual
50
Sennert, De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu (1619), trans. Nicholas
Culpeper and Abdial Cole as Chymistry Made Easie and Useful: Or, the Agreement and Disagreement of the
Chymists and Galenists (London, 1662), 18. See also Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity’ (note 40), 12649 on
Paracelsus’ habitual collapse of analogy into identity and vigorous objections by Thomas Erastus, Francis
Bacon, Daniel Sennert and J.B. van Helmont.
51
Translated by C.B. Schmitt, in his John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston,
Canada, 1983), 212.
52
Reviewing Promethean Ambitions in Metascience 14 (2005), 28992, Alisha Rankin judged ‘Newman’s
attempts to tie his presentation of the artnature debate into current concerns about cloning’ as
‘unnecessary. Although it may aid the modern reader in conceptualising some of the issues that Newman
discusses, the thread that ties Mediaeval and early modern philosophy to modern biomedical ethics is so
thin that the comparison adds little to the book’ (29192).
Essay Review 155
dysfunction that rendered him an unreliable commentator. If alchemy was, as

Newman claims, at the centre of the debate between art and nature, the over-
whelming verdict went against it. Alchemists were reluctant to concede the limits of
their art, but to many others they were all too visible.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Barbara Obrist and Antonio Clericuzio for their helpful
comments on an earlier version of this essay. They are not responsible for any errors
it contains.
Note added in proof

In my evaluation of William Newman’s thesis I referred only briefly to his
treatment of Francis Bacon (p. 27, note 48). Its deficiencies are clearly exposed in a
recent and important essay by Sophie Weeks, ‘Francis Bacon and the ArtNature
Distinction’.53 Dr Weeks criticizes Newman for focussing on ‘Bacon’s concept of art,
ignoring his profound reflections on the concept of nature’, which in turn depends on
his theory of matter (p. 122). For Bacon, as for other Renaissance philosophers
(Bruno and Telesio), matter was not inert but appetitive, a source of both concord
and discord. Bacon envisaged the beginning of things as a union between Chaos and
Cupid, or Love. In itself, matter has
a certain inclination and appetite to dissolve the world and fall back into the
ancient chaos; but that the overswaying concord of things (which is represented
by Cupid or Love) restrains its ill will and effort in that direction and reduces it
to order (p. 128).
As Bacon developed his theory of natural philosophy, a discipline dedicated ‘to ‘‘the
effecting of all things possible’’ and in particular the production of ‘‘new works’’
(nova opera)’ (p. 121), he conceived ‘a radical transformation of the concept of nature
itself’, giving the terms ‘art’ and ‘nature’ a new role. ‘In Bacon’s programme, art
refers to the shifting of the current system out of its habitual course in order to
actualise hidden facets of nature’ (pp. 1323).
Newman’s assimilation of Bacon to his theory of alchemy as the real source and
focus of the ‘artnature debate’ has seriously misinterpreted him. Newman’s ‘attempt
to include Bacon with [Geberian alchemists] under the notional construct of ‘‘the
perfective arts’’54 does him a disservice’ (p. 120). Newman claims that Bacon shared
alchemy’s claim to perfect nature by citing a passage where, supposedly, Bacon
‘explicitly equates ‘‘forces and bonds’’ with ‘‘help and perfection’’’.55 But Weeks
shows that in this passage Bacon described the mechanical arts as ‘bonds of nature’
in arguing that ‘nature . . . is forced by art to do what would not have been done
without it’ (p. 132, note 104). Newman also erred in aligning Bacon’s natural
philosophy with the alchemists’ imitationes naturae, such as artificial rainbows and
artificial gold. Weeks shows that, for Bacon, ‘knowledge of forms is proven only by
systematically producing true nova’ (p. 134, note 116). These ‘new works’ come about
53
Ambix, vol. 54, no. 2, July 2007, pp. 11745.
54
Promethean Ambitions, pp. 2912.
55
Ibid., p. 258.
156 Essay Review
through ‘associating and dissociating natural bodies’, compositio and mistio. New-
man described this notion as ‘a commonplace among the medieval scholastics’, not
observing that Bacon gave the traditional terms a new connotation: ‘compositio refers
to the operator’s actual uniting of bodies, and mistio to the outcome of that union
where a new form obtains: the former is a work of art, and the latter is the work of
nature’ (p. 137). The role of art is to discover ‘new ways of binding nature, restricting
its inherent power, and thereby causing it to transform itself . . . ’ (p. 138). Bacon’s
vision far exceeded that of the alchemists.
Sophie Weeks rightly rebuked William Newman for not having paid attention to
Bacon’s philosophical fables, De Sapientia Veterum, as a key text for his philosophy.
One fable which both overlooked is that of Atalanta, a famously fast runner, whom
Hippomenes challenged to a race. If he won, she would marry him; if he lost, he

would be killed. Soon outstripped, Hippomenes resorted to a trick, rolling the first of
three golden balls in her path. She stopped to pick up each of them, so losing the
race. In Bacon’s interpretation (as translated by Peter Shaw in 1733),
This Fable seems to contain a noble Allegory of the Contest betwixt Art and
Nature. For Art, here denoted by Atalanta, is much swifter, or more
expeditious, in its Operations than Nature, when all Obstacles and Impedi-
ments are removed; and sooner arrives at its End . . . . Yet this Prerogative and
singular Efficacy of Art, is stopt and retarded, to the infinite detriment of
human Life, by certain golden Apples: for there is no one Science, or Art, that
constantly holds on its true and proper Course to the End; but they are all
continually stopping short, forsaking the track, and turning aside to Profit and
Convenience; exactly like Atalanta. Whence, ’tis no wonder that Art gets not the
Victory over Nature; nor, according to the Condition of the Contest, brings her
under Subjection: but, on the contrary, remains subject to her, as a Wife to a
Husband.
Shaw added a brief commentary to this fable, which may serve as a caution to
historians who elevate the terms ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’ into mutually exclusive categories:
The Author, in all his physical Works, proceeds upon this Foundation; that it is
possible, and practicable, for Art to obtain the Victory over Nature; that is, for
human Industry and Power to procure, by the means of proper Knowledge,
such things as are necessary to render Life as happy and commodious as its
mortal State will allow: For instance, that it is possible to lengthen the present
Period of human Life; bring the Winds more under Command, and every way
extend and enlarge the Dominion, or Empire, of Man over the Works of
Nature. And let no one fearfully apprehend, that there is danger in thus
endeavouring to take the Reins of Government out of Nature’s hands, and
putting them into the weak hands of Men: for the Distinction betwixt Men and
Nature is imaginary, and only made to help the Understanding; Man himself
being necessarily subject to the Laws of Nature: tho’ within the Compass of
these Laws he has a very extensive Power, that will always be commensurate to
Knowledge.56
56
Peter Shaw, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon. Methodized, and made English. . . , 3 vols.
(London, 1733), vol 1, pp. 5645.

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The ‘New Historiography’ and the

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00033790701245497

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The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy

Press, 2004. xxxvi 352 pp. $80.00. ISBN 0-226-57701-5.

WILLIAM R. NEWMAN, Promethean Ambitions. Alchemyand the Quest to Perfect Nature.

LAUREN KASSELL, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Simon Forman:

BRIAN VICKERS, School of Advanced Study, London University, Senate House,

devised a world-system populated with a vast number of supernatural beings

places ‘Boyle’s notion of supernatural alchemical activity’ in its historical context.12

‘Some Questions of Great Importance to be Resolved by the Fire Concerning the

original by adding introductions and conclusions in ‘the florid language typical of

pregnant’ (162). Kassell’s account of Forman’s treatment of women is studiously

Newman attempts to relativize*and hence discount*Leonardo’s objections as those

of causes’ or of certain truth drawn deductively from established principles, and

Viewed as a whole, medieval alchemy presents itself as an art which incessantly

existence in the thirteenth century of so many diverse theories of matter provided

since it claimed to be able to transmute metals. However, this ‘shape-changing’

pseudo-Paracelsian treatise gives what Newman describes as ‘a lengthy description of

days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb, or at least so

4. Therefore, Paracelsus’ ‘ambivalent sexuality’ explains his opposition to

chemical art without the mating of male and female!51

dysfunction that rendered him an unreliable commentator. If alchemy was, as

Note added in proof

Hippomenes challenged to a race. If he won, she would marry him; if he lost, he

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Newman attempts to relativizeand hence discountLeonardo’s objections as those