Studies in History

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344–352

www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

and Philosophyof Science

Essay review

Alchemical artisans, artisanal alchemy

Robert Ralley

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane,

Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

Distilling knowledge: Alchemy, chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution

Bruce T. Moran; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London, 2005, pp. 210,Price £16.95 US$24.95 hardback, ISBN 0-674-01495-2.

John French, doctor of medicine, writer and translator, explained to his readers how tolearn alchemy. Think before proceeding, he warned: ‘enter not upon the practicke till thouart first well versed in the theory, for it is much better to learn with thy braines, and imag-ination, then with thy hands, and costs’. Diligently ‘read the sayings of true Philosophers,read them over again and again, and meditate on them . . . Compare their sayings with thepossibility of Nature, and obscure places with cleare’. Lastly, if at all possible:

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acquaint thy self throughly with some true Philosophers . . . A faithfull well experi-enced master will teach thee more in the mysteries of Alchymy in a quarter of a year,then by thine owne studies and chargeable operations thou shalt learn in sevenyeares. In the first place therefore, and above all things apply thy selfe to an expert,faithfull, and communicative Artist, and account it a great gain, if thou canst pur-chase his favour, though with a good gratuity, to lead thee through the manuall prac-tice at the chiefest, and choisest preparations.1

Robert Boyle knew the importance of personal instruction, and expended significant ener-gies soliciting reports from and interviews with practitioners.2 He was trained in the art bythe visiting American George Starkey, who in turn had been taught in Massachusetts by a

681/$ - see front matter � 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1016/j.shpsa.2006.03.004

ail address: rcr23@cam.ac.uk (R. Ralley).nch (1653), sig. B3[r]–[B3v].ncipe (2000), pp. 205–207.

R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344–352 345

physician called Richard Palgrave.3 Philosophical nous was not enough: training andskilled support in chemical manipulation were an essential basis for alchemicalachievement.

According to Bruce T. Moran’s new textbook, acknowledging the artisanal quality ofalchemical pursuits is important for understanding their role in the establishment of thenew philosophy. Distilling knowledge describes the fate of alchemy during the early modernperiod, tracing its path as it found favour with princes and experimental philosophers, andas successive reformers shaped it both as a university discipline and as an alternative toscholastic learning. Moran discusses these issues in terms of ‘the Scientific Revolution’;but this is not, as the reader is taken to have assumed, about ‘the triumph of human reasonover mysticism, magic, and the occult’, in which ‘the brotherhood of reason finally dispelledthe orcs of intellectual darkness’ (p. 4). Instead, the picture we should entertain is of ‘ananimated muddle of belief, disillusion, and reinterpretation’ as people work out ‘what thereis to talk about in the structure of nature, and how to learn more about it’ (p. 7). In thisconfusion, practical procedures and the varied attempts to interpret them play a particu-larly important role: this is how we should understand alchemy’s place in the story.

The remarks placed on the back cover proclaim the book to be unique, and rightly so:as a textbook introduction to early modern alchemy it is literally matchless. It fills a sub-stantial (and rather surprising) gap in the introductory literature for this period.4 Forthose primarily concerned with the developments in natural philosophy during the seven-teenth century, it holds the attraction of contextualising with admirable clarity the moremysterious activities of such luminaries as Boyle and Newton; for those interested chieflyin the history of alchemy itself, it presents a synthesis (one is inclined to say distillation) ofseveral years of renewed scholarly industry in the area. For the teacher of a course on thistopic, there is no other comparable resource.

One of the most perplexing things about alchemy is its sheer diversity: even the question‘What was it?’ can prompt confusing and inconclusive responses. Having briefly set out hishistoriographical stall, Moran begins with a discussion of the existing alchemical tradi-tions inherited by early modern practitioners. In treatises by the medieval FranciscansJohn of Rupescissa and Roger Bacon, and some attributed to Ramon Lull, readers foundinjunctions to extract, by means of distillation, ‘fifth essences’ from various substances,from metals to alcohol to human blood. Such a product would be pure, an ‘elixir’ thatwould help prolong life. They also described a ‘Philosophers’ Stone’, a substance thatincreased purity and could be used to transmute metals. The possibilities afforded by thisproved as alluring to European rulers as they were worrying to the Church; but alchemyalso remained the subject of much theoretical speculation. Petrus Bonus, a fourteenth-cen-tury physician, tried to show that as a branch of knowledge alchemy had a place in theAristotelian hierarchy of scientiae but denied any manual involvement in the art.

Notwithstanding Bonus’s remarks, Moran argues, the bulk of alchemical activity in thisperiod was practical: by artisans in workshops or even in the home. Leonardo da Vinciand Vanoccio Biringuccio, master craftsmen and papal clients, sneered at the suggestionthat gold could be fabricated but praised the capabilities of alchemists in dealing with met-als, dyes and medicines. Those who claimed to have found the elixir of life, Biringuccio

3 See Newman (1994), pp. 48–50; Newman & Principe (2002), p. 157 and pp. 208–222.4 Existing textbooks are of much broader scope and in any case typically reflect historiographical preferences

now out of favour: see for example Holmyard (1957), Read (1957) and Taylor (1951).

346 R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344–352

noted, were no less dead; but alchemy was the ‘origin and foundation of many other arts’,and was to be revered and practised for ‘the fine fruits of its effects and the knowledge ofthem’ as well as the ‘pleasing novelty’ it showed to the practitioner (p. 42). Moran outlinesa rise in literacy among artisans in the Renaissance and uses this to justify taking suchworks as George Agricola’s De re metallica (Basel, 1556) as expressive of artisanal culture.Vernacular works on ‘craft’ and ‘household alchemy’, outlining chemical processes andmedical recipes, were part of this ‘popular publishing milieu’ (p. 47); ‘books of secrets’ helda special fascination. Most intriguingly, books by and for women, as well as householdmanuals, located distillation strictly within the ‘inner household’ province of the wife,not the ‘outer household’ of the husband.

Alchemy’s craft traditions and theoretical speculations were reconfigured by Paracel-sus. Theophrast von Hohenheim, whose soubriquet was a claim to medical superiorityover the healers of classical antiquity, established a cosmology that blended magicand alchemy within a Christian framework, and demanded the overturning of scholas-ticism. Illness was a result of spiritual imperfection, inherited by humans after the Fall,and it manifested itself by the failure of natural alchemical processes within the body.The best healers produced their remedies by emulating in the laboratory the processesthat had gone wrong. The good healer knew that matter was a combination of threeprinciples, Sulphur, Salt and Mercury, and could tell which predominated in a particulardisease; could read the ‘signatures’ in nature that disclosed the medicinal uses of objectsand substances; and above all, relied on experience rather than moribund book-learning.Paracelsus’s doctrines were attractive to outsiders critical of the medical establishment,and for that reason if no other the label ‘Paracelsian’ gained currency as a term of deri-sion; but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chemical remedies were increas-ingly accepted even within the Galenic system, propounded not only by adherents toParacelsus’s vision, but also by followers of Jean Baptiste van Helmont’s water-based,vitalist adaptation.

German physician and schoolmaster Andreas Libavius bemoaned the influence of‘moderns’ such as Paracelsus who substituted their chance discoveries for the wisdomof past authors and destroyed all consensus about the real art of chemical manipula-tion. As Moran points out, the battle in which Libavius was engaged was as muchabout institutional legitimisation as it was about philosophy. Paracelsians were firmlyensconced in courts across Europe, though Moran suggests that such sites conveyedno intellectual legitimacy for re-evaluating past experiences and ‘establishing the essen-tial meaning of chemistry’ (p. 103). Instead, Libavius turned to the universities, rework-ing chemistry as a more philosophical activity, to suit the demands of scholasticcurricula and cultures. There too, however, Paracelsianism gained a foothold: JohannesHartmann was installed at Marburg in 1609 by Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, and con-structed a ‘public chemico-medical laboratory’ within which he taught processes includ-ing by 1615–1616 some recipes outlined in Oswald Croll’s Royal chemistry, printed thatyear (p. 111). In various guises the subject was entering the universities. Part of itsredefinition involved the sidelining, and sometimes stigmatisation, of alchemists: Nich-olas Lemery, royal apothecary, wrote in A course of chemistry (Paris, 1675) that theywere frauds interested only in gold. Johannes Bohn, in his Chemical–physical disserta-

tions of 1696, took alchemy to mean transmutation and described it as an aspect ofchemistry. This new chemistry, of which alchemy was a part, was defined primarilyas a set of practical procedures for acquiring knowledge.

R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344–352 347

The importance of ways of establishing knowledge was a topic in vogue. FrancisBacon suggested that nature should be placed ‘under constraint and vexed’ in orderto learn (p. 133); Rene Descartes referred to a ‘habit of discovering truths’, beginningwith ‘easy things’ and ‘passing by degrees to more difficult ones’ by handicraft (p.135). Moran indicates a resemblance to alchemy in both these cases. Robert Boyleblended Cartesianism and Paracelsian and Helmontian alchemical traditions, in anexperimental philosophy inspired by Francis Bacon. With van Helmont he rejected boththe microcosm–macrocosm connection and the claim that all matter was composed ofSulphur, Salt and Mercury; but he abandoned a long search for van Helmont’s universalsolvent having apparently decided that the alchemist had taken his secret with him intothe grave. Boyle decried speculation on the principles of matter, but took his corpuscu-larian theory from an alchemical tradition. He sought the Philosophers’ Stone so that hemight talk with angels and make manifest God’s existence. Above all, Boyle experi-mented. Johann Joachim Becher differed from Boyle on the topic of what made up mat-ter, but agreed on the importance of acting on nature rather than simply observing it;Georg Ernst Stahl, an admirer of Becher and proponent of a new form of vitalism,agreed, claiming that art was very similar to nature and could imitate it for usefulpurposes.

Successive approaches blended mechanism and experimentalism. Friedrich Hoffmandrew on a mechanical philosophy in his explanations of phenomena and claimed thatchemistry could reveal hidden properties in bodies: he called the experience a practitionerobtained in this way ‘the first parent of truth’ (p. 160). Such a straightforward and all-embracing system, in which everything was about the physical relationships between par-ticles, was a triumph in terms of teaching medicine; but where Hoffman criticised the use ofancient texts, Isaac Newton’s alchemical, philosophical, mathematical and theologicalpursuits depended on it. He tested his syncretist readings by experiment and worked inalchemy as part of his natural philosophy, seeking proof that God continually acted inthe world through forces acting at a distance between pieces of matter. Other authors,including John Freind in 1712 and Hermann Boerhaave later in the eighteenth century,took on modified versions of mechanism, with occult forces (Freind) or the occasionalnon-mechanical cause for a phenomenon (Boerhaave). By the eighteenth century, accord-ing to Moran, ‘chemistry had become a major part of the new, experimental science’ butretained many of ‘the questions of traditional alchemy’ (pp. 180–181). Most importantly,learned proponents now defined it as the set of practical procedures that had always beenat its heart. Eighteenth-century ‘chemistry’, despite the occasional attempts of its adher-ents to suggest otherwise, remained part of a tradition that stretched back to Rupescissa,Bacon and pseudo-Lull, and beyond.

As compelling as we may find the picture painted by Moran, it is important to be clearabout the grounds for his claim that ‘artisans and scholars’ were ‘joined . . . together in thepursuit of natural knowledge’ (p. 189). What the book demonstrates is not so much junc-ture as juxtaposition. The account of artisans’ engagement in alchemy takes place princi-pally in the second chapter, while the discussions of mechanism and experimentalism,topics more closely associated with versions of ‘the Scientific Revolution’, are in the fifthand sixth. By this point the narrative is concerned with scholars interpreting phenomena,the mechanics involved (in both senses) having moved to the background. The suggestionis perhaps one of appropriation: following in the footsteps of Edgar Zilsel, a number ofscholars have proposed that both mechanical and experimental philosophies owed a great

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deal to early modern artisanal culture.5 We can go further, however, and document thecontinuing involvement of artisans in these experimental projects. Moran is right: alchemydoes provide an interesting case for examining the relationship between scholars andartisans.

It is, of course, an open question how far we can recover such practical pursuits, espe-cially when the majority of the evidence that survives consists of composed texts. LarryStewart has suggested that to understand the activities of members of the Royal Societyin the period after the Reformation, we must follow them in their shift away from the tex-tual to the practical, and look at events and deeds rather than books; the recommendationis worth bearing in mind in our case.6 The aspect of alchemy to which we have greatestaccess is its textual tradition—despite the rhetoric of secrecy and of oral transmission ofknowledge we have inherited a vast corpus of alchemical works—and we should take careto reflect that. Histories that focus on alchemical writings, after all, need not rest on thesupposition that there was nothing more to alchemy than authorship.7 But any wish torecapture something more of the ‘chemical’ practice of alchemy, of its distillations and cal-cinations, of its associations with metallurgy or pharmacy or the household, demands thatwe attend to events and deeds, and extrapolate carefully from those extraordinary cases ofwhich we have record. There are aspects of practice that were not written down, eitherbecause they could not, as in the case of the tacit skills demanded of an alchemist and iden-tified by John French as absent from texts, or because they were invisible, as with the ser-vants and assistants who disappeared from accounts of experiments except when they didsomething wrong.8 To understand alchemy as a practical activity we must pay attention toit as a social activity.

Indeed, as French identified, and as alchemical literature claimed, a key relationship inalchemy was between an adept and his apprentice. Those chemical practitioners whosought wisdom might read texts but they were best advised to find a person to ask. Tho-mas Charnock, a sixteenth-century alchemist, had been left a number of alchemical bookswhen his uncle died, but several years later, at the age of twenty, began to search through-out England for alchemical secrets, and was only initiated by two adepts (a priest and aformer abbot) when he reached twenty-eight.9 These encounters were not always as clan-destine as such accounts might imply. Particularly with the spread of Paracelsianism,alchemists offered their services as tutors and provided regular classes, both theoreticaland practical. William Yworth, known in his texts under the pseudonym ‘CleidophorusMystagogus’, started teaching chemical theory and practice at the Academia SpagyricaNova in London shortly after he arrived in England in 1691.10 Such ties bring us rightup to the period of the experimental philosophy. Robert Plot, who was (among otherthings) appointed professor of chemistry at Oxford, teaching at the building created forthe Ashmolean Museum from 1683 until 1690, and John Mayow, medical practitioner,experimental philosopher and author of tracts of medical and chemical interest, were both

5 See, for example, Zilsel (1942); Bennett (1986); Smith (2004).6 Stewart (1992), pp. 3–30.7 See, for example, Kassell (2005), pp. 173–189.8 Shapin (1994), pp. 355–407.9 Schuler (2004); Taylor (1938–1946), p. 149.

10 Mandelbrote (2004).

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taught chemical techniques by a man called William Wilden in a course in Oxford in1667.11 Courses such as these were useful for alchemists and experimental philosophersnot only to learn skills themselves, but to improve those of their servants. Robert Boylewrote in 1661 enquiring about the possibility of sending a servant to lessons in a labora-tory in Oxford and was assured that the boy would be taught to ‘operate with his ownhands’.12

Servants were often crucial participants. Many alchemical processes required continu-ous supervision for a long period of time and skilled operators were employed to man thefurnaces and stills. John Dee hired Roger Cooke to be his alchemical assistant at the age offourteen in 1567, a position Cooke held till 1581; after this period Cooke may have workedwith the London-based medical practitioner and alchemist Francis Anthony and helpedHenry Percy with a still house in the Tower.13 References to such assistants, frequentlydescribed as laborants, occur in many correspondences and books of the period: witnessSamuel Hartlib’s remark to Robert Boyle in 1654 that he was waiting for his son-in-law’s‘laborant’ to arrive, or Boyle’s reference in A chymical paradox of 1682 to one managingdistillations for him.14 Assistants were usually seen as skilful, but probably not knowledge-able; one of the interlocutors in Boyle’s The sceptical chymist distinguished ‘betwixt thosechymists, that are either cheats, or but laborants, and the true adepti’.15

Yet the boundaries between assistant and alchemist tended to be fluid, where theyexisted at all. The difference between one and the other could be remarkably little andwas sometimes a matter of perception. Roger Cooke, Dee’s assistant, had been in the posi-tion for around twelve years when Dee passed on an alchemical secret to him; a year and ahalf later, in the summer of 1581, the two argued when Cooke was not invited to be pres-ent during an alchemical experiment and he left soon afterwards. On his leaving, Deepromised him £100 and ‘some pretty alchemical experiments, wheruppon he might hon-estly live’.16 Sometimes it was simply a question of one’s relationship with others. PeterStahl was a Paracelsian alchemist who came to London from the continent in the late1650s and settled in Oxford, temporarily working as a laboratory technician for Boyle,but moving out of Boyle’s house and starting out as a private chemistry tutor shortly after-wards.17 It was not uncommon for someone who worked as an assistant to supplementthat primary income by producing medicines and other alchemically significant sub-stances. Christopher White, who had learned his skills as an assistant on Stahl’s coursesand served Boyle for a decade, moved back to Oxford in 1676 to set up and run a univer-sity chemical laboratory in the Ashmolean Museum; aside from demonstrations for stu-dents to accompany the lectures, he ran a dispensary in the laboratory, producingchemical medicines.18

If one’s status within the alchemical world was linked to one’s relationships to otherpractitioners, those relationships presented an opportunity for redetermining that status.

11 Turner (2004); Brock (2004).12 Young (2004).13 Kassell (2004).14 Shapin (1994), pp. 362–363.15 Shapin (1994), p. 363. William Newman and Lawrence Principe take George Starkey to have made a similar

distinction: Newman & Principe (2002), pp. 153–154.16 Kassell (2004).17 Young (2004); Meynell (1995).18 Simcock (2004).

350 R. Ralley / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 37 (2006) 344–352

The case of Cooke and Dee is a clear example in which learning alchemical secrets was, atleast in Cooke’s eyes, a route from assistant to something more; but in other situations itmight well be the teacher’s status at issue. The relationship between teacher and studentwas not always that of adept to apprentice. Simon Forman, whose self-portrayal oftenseems at odds with what we can reconstruct about his life and practices, acknowledgedonly one debt to someone he had encountered in person: a ‘simple fellowe’ had taughthim in the alchemical art.19 George Starkey instructed Robert Boyle in chemical proce-dures, in return for which Boyle (against Starkey’s will) did his best to portray Starkeyas a technician by writing him out of his experimental accounts.20

In fact, it is worthy of remark that some of those whose experiences we are trying torecover as those of ‘artisans’ did their utmost to escape that label. I have already men-tioned Forman, who effaced the social dimensions of his education and emphasised hisdebts to texts and divine inspiration communicated through dreams. His self-portrayalwas as a learned and inspired magus, not an artisan.21 It is worth considering how wemight categorise John Hester, a Paracelsian distiller who made medicinal preparationsincluding an ‘Elixer vitae’ and ‘La petra philosophale nostra’; he made his living sellingthese but also produced medical books, editing Thomas Hill’s translation A joyfull jewell

(London, 1579), writing a guide to distilling oils, and translating various works by Para-celsus and others.22 It is worth wondering, in fact, if in trying to categorise him we mightnot actually be missing the point.

Lawrence Principe has reminded us that alchemy is not something that admits of easygeneralisations; it was precisely this breadth (social as well as cultural) and the variety ofavailable associations that lent it such an ambivalent aspect.23 Alchemists might be seen asconmen, deluded fools seeking riches but overestimating human capacity to imitate nat-ure, healers, elite guardians of secret wisdom, or simply philanthropic craftsmen. Expertisewas claimed by and imputed to participants based on practical experience, personalinstruction, reading and inspiration. The suggestion that someone sought to derive moneyfrom their practice was as likely to be an insult as an analytical category.24 The artisanaland the scholarly are difficult for us to tease apart precisely because they were difficult toseparate then. The new forms of natural philosophy that appeared in the early modernperiod, however, were created by gentlemen and functioned largely as part of genteel cul-ture.25 Legitimacy, at least for the proponents of the experimental philosophy, related tothe lack of pecuniary incentive felt by a philosopher as opposed to an artisan. Gentlemenapproached practical matters not ‘as their dull, and unavoidable, and perpetual employ-

ments, but as their Diversions’, wrote Thomas Sprat in his history of the Royal Society,and ‘much Treasure must sometimes be scatter’d without any return’.26 Finances and mindrendered the gentleman of means more suited to the improvement of knowledge than theartisan dependent on his craft. Experimental philosophy elevated the importance of the

19 Kassell (2005), esp. pp. 56–59.20 Newman (1994), pp. 70–72; Newman & Principe (2002), pp. 208–222, 269–270.21 Kassell (2005), esp. pp. 56–59.22 Bennell (2004).23 Principe (2000), p. 217.24 For debates over the commercial possibilities of alchemy see Nummedal (2002).25 Shapin (1994).26 Ibid., pp. 396–397.

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practical arts and denied the capacity of artisans to determine how best to prosecute them.Alchemical operators could still find roles assisting in laboratories. They employed thesame techniques of chemical manipulation. But the relative social diversity of alchemywas replaced with a structure whose boundaries were more carefully policed. Artisanscould be adepts but they could not be philosophers.

So while it is useful to note that the ‘artisans and scholars’ ‘joined . . . together’ pictureowes more than a little to the rhetoric of experimental philosophers, we have neverthelessreturned to Moran’s ‘animated muddle of belief, disillusion, and reinterpretation’. It is oneof the merits of a good textbook that it exposes the strengths and weaknesses of the sec-ondary literature. Distilling knowledge both offers an introduction to issues such as thisone and makes their exploration a less daunting prospect. The work is a thoughtful andclear overview of territory that is still far from completely explored. This is an overdue,impressive, and above all useful book.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lauren Kassell and Jill Whitelock for their helpful comments.

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