IntroductionAuthor(s): Bruce T. MoranSource: Isis, Vol. 102, No. 2 (June 2011), pp. 300-304Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660138 .Accessed: 04/07/2011 06:40

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FOCUS: ALCHEMY AND THE HISTORY OFSCIENCE

Introduction

By Bruce T. Moran*

ABSTRACT

Alchemy is part of the cultural experience of early modern Europe and yet has had toovercome problems of demarcation to be considered relevant to the history of science. Thisessay considers historiographical and methodological issues that have affected the gradualdemarginalization of alchemy among attempts to explain, and find things out about, nature. Asan area of historical study, alchemy relates to the history of science as part of an ensemble ofpractices that explored the natural world through natural philosophy and speculative traditionsand by functioning as a nexus of social and intellectual life.

HISTORIANS OF SCIENCE HAVE WORKED HARD to restore the indigenous status ofsubjects sometimes cut off from the conditions that created them. Moving away from “big

picture” narratives that vaulted from one individual mountaintop to another, we are now alertin framing the history of science to what John Dewey observed in connection to art—namely,that “mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest on the earth. Theyare the earth in one of its manifest operations.”1 The cultural earth of the period later labeled“early modern” linked ideas, practices, passions, and vocations in a variety of attempts to knowthe world. In so doing, alchemy made up part of the era’s cultural clay. As both a textual anda practical domain, it combined representation with performance, spiritual experience withmaterial agency, speculative philosophy with the examination of “empirical particulars.”Alchemy supplied a nexus for intersecting fields of knowledge and techniques of inquiry andbrought together as well broad elements of social and intellectual life that connected the

* Department of History, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557; moran@unr.edu.This Focus section was organized by Bruce T. Moran.1 John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigee, 2005), p. 2.

Isis, 2011, 102:300–304©2011 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.0021-1753/2011/10202-0004$10.00

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dynamics of gender, art, patronage, and commerce to the processes of knowledge making.2

Nevertheless, even while allowing for a more pluralistic view of what should count as relevantto the construction of natural knowledge in a period of enormous change, alchemy has had tostruggle against its own historiography in finding a secure place within the history of science.Part of the problem has been its very earthiness.

Things, Samuel Johnson observed, were “the sons of heaven,” but words, he declared,were “the daughters of earth.” Beyond the universal problem of representation versusreality, the words of alchemists, many believed, posed special, earthbound difficulties, ifnot obstructions, to “scientific” inquiry. Alchemy’s terminology seemed to reflect anepistemology that was secretive, subjective, and fundamentally noncommunicable. Theeighteenth century condemned the entire subject as irrational and esoteric, and earlywriters in the history of science followed suit. In the 1950s and 1960s the subject wasgenerally denounced as an obstacle to correct thinking, part of the “mystical jungle” of apremodern garden grown to seed. George Sarton described the difference between prac-tical alchemists and practical chemists as one of purpose. Alchemists were after thephilosophers’ stone and became interested in other things only when they failed toproduce gold. Allen Debus fought for alchemy’s relevance outside its own milieu, arguingfor its significance to the “Scientific Revolution” via the tradition of Neoplatonic cos-mology and an association with the discipline of chemical medicine.3 Nevertheless, theknowledge tree of history of science remained resistant to adding an extra branch. Until2002 the annual Isis bibliography compartmentalized alchemy as “Pseudo-science,” ademarcation with which no historical actor self-identified and one as problematic forhistorians of astrology and natural magic as for historians of later knowledge constructslike mesmerism and phrenology.

Even the apparent alchemical interests of one of the most significant figures in thehistory of science seemed at first to make little difference, partly because, when definedas mystical philosophy, alchemy appeared at odds with informed views of matter. CharlesGillispie, one of the founders of the history of science as a professional field, told hisstudents at Princeton that those who thought Isaac Newton had been interested in alchemywere mistaken. How could Newton have been interested in such a subject, since he wasinterested in corpuscles?4 But it was precisely here, as historians brought to light the extent

2 A few recent examples, limited to sources in English, include Tara E. Nummedal, “Practical Alchemy andCommercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in EarlyModern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 201–222;Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007); Smith, TheBusiness of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994);Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004);Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, “Georg Ernst Stahl’s Alchemical Publications: Anachronism, Reading Market, and aScientific Lineage Redefined,” in New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe(Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 23–43; Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and theScientific Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2007); Jessica Rankin “Becoming as Expert”Tractitioner-Court Experimentalism and the Medical Skills of Anna of Saxony (1532–1585), Isis, 2007, 98:23–53; andSimon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2010).

3 Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton Univ. Press, 1960), p. 205 (“mystical jungle”); George Sarton, “Ancient Alchemy and Abstract Art,”Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1954, 11:157–173, on p. 161; and Allen G. Debus, “Alchemyand the Historian of Science,” History of Science, 1967, 6:128–137. See also Debus, The Chemical Philosophy:Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science HistoryPublications, 1977); and Debus, The Chemical Promise: Experiment and Mysticism in the Chemical Philosophy,1550–1800: Selected Essays (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2006).

4 Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity, p. 122.

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to which alchemy affected the views of Newton, Boyle, and other figures already caughtup in the metaphor of “Scientific Revolution,” that alchemy began to be taken moreseriously as a potent cultural force influencing attempts to understand the operations ofnature.5 More precise readings of alchemical texts uncovered communicable and replica-ble procedures and brought to light theoretical structures linked to medieval traditions ofalchemy that were consistent with later assumptions about the particulate nature ofmatter.6

Of major consequence in the reevaluation of alchemy’s relevance to the history ofscience have been the historiographical studies of Lawrence Principe and William New-man. Their analyses pointed to the eighteenth century as the source of an epistemologicalspace that distanced the subject from chemistry and aligned it with deceptive and secretivearts like witchcraft and magic. Alchemy, in these terms, presumed disorder, and part of therehabilitation of alchemy in the history of science has been not only to recognize the originof this distinction but to confront it as an a priori depiction. A more precise reading ofearly modern alchemical authors tied alchemy and chemistry more closely together, andin recent writings the two have been joined by means of the rhetorical binding agent of“chymistry.”7 Moreover, studying the indigenous uses of terms like “alchemia” and“chemia” also revealed that in some settings it was alchemy that possessed the status ofan art, while chemistry (i.e., chemia) did not.8 In contrast to what Enlightenment writerslater perceived, prominent authors of an earlier period insisted that the processes of

5 Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy; or, “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon”(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975); Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy inNewton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Richard S. Westfall, “The Role of Alchemy inNewton’s Career,” in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelliand William Shea (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 189–232; Karin Figala, “Newton asAlchemist,” Hist. Sci., 1977, 15:102–137; Figala, “Die exakte Alchemie von Isaac Newton,” Verhandlungen derNaturforschenden Gesellschaft in Basel, 1984, 94:155–228; Michael Hunter, “Alchemy, Magic, and Moralismin the Thought of Robert Boyle,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1990, 23:387–410; Lawrence M.Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,1998); Frank Greiner, ed., Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siecle (Paris: S.E.H.A., 1998); MichelBougard, ed., Alchemy, Chemistry, and Pharmacy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); and William R. Newman andPrincipe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2002).

6 William R. Newman, “The Alchemical Sources of Robert Boyle’s Corpuscular Philosophy,” Annals ofScience, 1996, 53:567–585; Newman, “Experimental Corpuscular Theory in Aristotelian Alchemy: From Geberto Sennert,” in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theory, ed. Christoph Luthy, JohnMurdoch, and Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 291–329; Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and theExperimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006); Antonio Clericuzio,Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dor-drecht: Kluwer, 2000); Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, IntellectualContext, and Influence of Petrus Severinus, 1540–1602 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004); MargaretGarber, “Chymical Wonders of Light: J. Marci’s Seventeenth-Century Bohemian Optics,” Early Science andMedicine, 2005, 10:478–509; and Lawrence M. Principe, “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy,” inInstruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, ed. Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor Levere(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 55–74.

7 Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” inSecrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Newman and Anthony Grafton(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 385–431; Newman and Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: TheEtymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Sci. Med., 1998, 3:32–65; Newman, “From Alchemyto ‘Chymistry,’” in The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park andLorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 497–517; and Principe, ed., Chymists andChymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: ScienceHistory Publications, 2007).

8 Bruce T. Moran, Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures withPolemical Fire (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2007).

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alchemia were clear and communicable (once one understood their language and refer-ences), while the counsels of chemia (linked to Paracelsian traditions of chemical medi-cine) were obscure. The professor of medicine at Jena, Zacharias Brendel (the younger)(1592–1638), dramatically underscored the situation when he decided in a text later editedby Werner Rolfinek, that chemia needed to be restored to the form of an art. He lookedfor help in what the alchemical author known as Theobald von Hoghelande had writtenabout transmutation in a book aimed at students of alchemy. Chemia, Brendel knew,suffered from a bad reputation. That is why some physicians felt like vomiting at the verymention of the name. Making chemia an art required that it take up the methods ofalchemy and attain professional status within medicine. Brendel was not kind to reluctantphysicians. Those who refused chemia’s deserved place among the medical arts, heurged—referring to a suggestion made earlier by Thomas Moffett (1553–1604)—shouldbe hung up, smoked, and salted like herring.9

Even as an art, chemia, Brendel observed, was not the scientia scientiarum that somehad claimed. Rather, it was, as he called it, a habitus; and the habitus chimicus was madeup of practices.10 Indeed, historical alchemy has offered an extremely fertile area forinquiry into various sorts of practice in the history of science, mediating between people,the social world, objects, and texts. As one of many “sites of encounter,” it affectedvarieties of personal agency while bringing together the tacit dimensions of knowing howand knowing that. In regard to practice, some experiences are shared, and paying attentionto the various practices of alchemy offers help in making the scientific cultures of the earlymodern and modern worlds a little less remote.11 When practices pass through “thealembic of personal experience,” familiarity ensues.12 For this reason, Primo Levi sug-gested that chemists (or ex-chemists) of his generation could recognize one another simplyby looking at the palms of each others’ hands. “The majority,” he recounted, “have a smallprofessional, highly specific scar,” obtained when students inevitably broke glass tubeswhile forcing them through cork or rubber plugs. “Here, in the palm of the working hand,was our mark: the mark of chemists still to some extent alchemists.” Levi recalled that,“despite the drawbacks,” practices like these “nurtured an intense camaraderie linked tothe common work,” so that each evening one left the lab “with a sensation of having‘learned how to do something,’ which,” he added, “life teaches, is different from having‘learned something.’”13

This particular Isis Focus section is made up of separate historical foci that take updifferent aspects of alchemy’s relevance in reconfiguring the dynamics of natural inquiryin the early modern era. In these essays, alchemy blends categories later made distinct, like

9 Theobald de Hoghelande, De Alchemiae Difficultatibus Liber (Coloniae, 1594), Prooemium, in Jo. JacobiMangeti . . . Bibliotheca chemica curiosa (Geneva, 1702), Vol. 1, pp. 336–368; and Zachariae Brendelii . . .Chimia in artis formam redacta . . . (1630; Jena: Typis Blasii Lobensteins, sumtibus Johannis Reiffenbergeri,1641), p. 5.

10 On the habitus chimicus see Zachariae Brendelii . . . Chimia in artis formam redacta, pp. 9–10.11 On practice theory see Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and

Presuppositions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time,Agency, and Science (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1995); and Pickering, “Practice and Posthumanism: SocialTheory and History of Agency,” in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore Schatzki, KarinKnorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 163–174.

12 Dewey, Art as Experience (cit. n. 1), p. 86 (“alembic of personal experience”).13 Primo Levi, “The Mark of the Chemist,” in Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York:

Summit, 1989), pp. 97–101. Regarding attention to the various practices of alchemy see, e.g., Bruce T. Moran,Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.Press, 2005).

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the science of matter and the science of life. The section raises questions about theinstability of terms, especially the meaning of “natural philosophy”; and it gives promi-nent place to the practices, both procedural and cultural, that underscore the relevance ofexperience of various sorts in processes linking accommodation and innovation. Theseessays do not seek a unified vision of the relation between alchemy and the history ofscience. Rather, each presents us with an individual perspective of associations andmeanings that fit what to most will be a foreign genre into a broadened acquaintance withthe natural world. In this regard, Lawrence Principe directs our attention to terminologicalissues that have wrenched alchemy out of its own environment. He emphasizes thecomplications that rhetorical and professional posturing and the reliance on a prioridefinitions of science, often grounded in positivism, have created for the integration ofalchemy and chemistry. William Newman highlights specific features of the recenthistoriography of alchemy that challenge persistent stereotypes in the history of scienceand offers ways of integrating scholastic and nonscholastic interpretations of matterthrough analytical insights gained by means of separate, yet allied, laboratory procedures.Historical alchemy becomes a means to gain greater insight into the role of experimentand the possibilities of understanding physical matter in the premodern world. KevinChang turns our attention to the fraught relationship between alchemy and vitalism; healso emphasizes alchemy’s role in bridging, as well as establishing, intellectual divisionsin science. Some alchemists, he shows, studied matter at the same time they studied life.However, the claims of Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734) not only drew a distinctionbetween “lifeless matter and the living being” but defined a more distant relationshipbetween chemistry and medicine. Since alchemy was never bound by a single definition,Tara Nummedal underscores the varieties of meaning attached to alchemical practicewithin distinct social spaces as vernacular alchemists competed for advantage within thealchemical marketplace. She thus identifies alchemical trajectories that maneuvered be-tween intellectual and technical domains and were guided as well by commercial motivesrelated to trade and the production of goods. These are, then, considerations in miniaturethat approach the relation between historical alchemy and the history of science fromdifferent angles. In so doing they offer a multifaceted depiction of ways in which alchemy,in theory and practice, merged with social, cultural, and intellectual processes of explain-ing and making use of the world in the European early modern era.

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