Alchemy And Authority In The Holy Roman Empire

by Nummedal, Tara

• ISBN13: 9780226608563
• ISBN10: 0226608565
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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

Author Biography

Tara Nummedal is assistant professor of history at Brown University

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Note on Early Modern Weights and Measures	p. xv
Abbreviations	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
Assembling Expertise	p. 17
The Alchemist's Personae	p. 40
Entrepreneurial Alchemy	p. 73
Contracting the Philosophers' Stone	p. 96
Laboratories, Space, and Secrecy	p. 119
Betruger on Trial	p. 147
Conclusion: The Problem of Authority	p. 177
Notes	p. 181
Selected Bibliography	p. 235
Index	p. 255
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