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Tara Nummedal
To cite this article: Tara Nummedal (2013) Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe, Ambix,
60:4, 311-322, DOI: 10.1179/0002698013Z.00000000036
INTRODUCTION
In his musings on the Last Days, printed posthumously in Table Talk, Martin Luther
turned to the subject of alchemy. “The science of alchymy I like well, and, indeed, ‘tis
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the philosophy of the ancients,” he reportedly told his companions. While Luther
welcomed “the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extract-
ing, and distilling herbs, [and] roots,” he was drawn to it in the context of his
faith as well. “I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification,
which is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day,”
he observed.
For, as in a furnace the fire extracts and separates from a substance the other portions,
and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the
dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass; even so God, at the day of
judgment, will separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly. The
Christians and righteous shall ascend upward into heaven, and there live everlastingly,
but the wicked and the ungodly, as the dross and filth, shall remain in hell, and there
be damned.1
Martin Luther was not an alchemist, of course, but the reformer’s allusion to
alchemy in discussing the Day of Judgment hints at how broadly the art resonated
as a way of engaging religion in sixteenth-century Europe.
Indeed, from the moment alchemical texts and ideas began to circulate in Euro-
pean scholarly circles in the twelfth century, alchemists and theologians alike
explored numerous connections between alchemy and Christianity. Like Luther,
some drew on alchemy as a way of explicating theological concepts (or vice
versa), while others drew analogies between the creation and operation of alchem-
ical materials and Biblical passages, or considered the effects of alchemical medicines
on the body in relation to the bodies of extraordinary figures like Adam, the Virgin
Mary, or the saints. Still others pondered whether and how alchemists’ skills might
1
Martin Luther, “Of the Resurrection,” Book DCCLX, The Table-Talk of Martin Luther, trans. William Hazlitt
(London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), 826. For the Latin original, see Martin Luther, D. Martin Luther’s Werke:
kritische Gesamtausgabe [Abt. 2]. Vol. 1, Tischreden (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912–1921), 1149.
© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2013 DOI 10.1179/0002698013Z.00000000036
312 TARA NUMMEDAL
it goes without question that alchemy and religion (or spirituality of various kinds) inter-
penetrated one another in the medieval and early modern periods, and that each bor-
rowed terms and concepts from the other. This fact is not, however, remarkable in
itself, nor is such interpenetration with religion unique to alchemy.5
Although their arguments did not go entirely uncontested, Principe and Newman
cleared the way for more rigorous, historical scholarship, and in the past decade
scholars have sought to construct a more subtle and nuanced understanding of
the complex relationship between alchemy and religion.6 Clearly many European
alchemists—just like their fellow naturalists, physicians, and astronomers—saw
profound links between the divine order and their manipulations of nature. If it is
unsurprising that alchemists were engaged with religion (or, conversely, that theolo-
gians were interested in alchemy), the four essays in this issue invite us to consider in
more detail precisely how these two traditions intersected in medieval and early
modern Christian Europe. The essays span the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
consider Catholic, Protestant, and even Jewish perspectives, and incorporate alche-
mists’ scholarly, medical, and transmutational aspirations. Each author examines a
2
For a general overview, see Zachary Matus, “Alchemy and Christianity in the Middle Ages,” History Compass 10,
no. 2 (2012): 934–45, and Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012), 61–62, 190–206.
3
Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, for instance, have rejected this claim repeatedly. See, for example,
Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and
Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
2001), 400; Principe, “Alchemy Restored,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 311, and The Secrets of Alchemy, 205.
4
Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” especially 396–401.
5
Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” 400.
6
For two critiques of Newman and Principe’s claims, see Leah DeVun, “‘Human Heaven’: John of Rupescissa’s
Alchemy at the End of the World,” in History in the Comic Mode, ed. Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 251–61, and Bruce Janacek, Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Reli-
gious Culture of Early Modern England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 13–14.
ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 313
and contested each was in late medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, one of
the important lessons of recent work in the history of alchemy has been that
‘alchemy’ encompassed a huge variety of ideas, practices, and participants, while
the cultural spaces it has occupied have changed enormously over time, rendering
it nearly meaningless to speak of ‘alchemy’ as if it were a timeless, coherent
entity.8 The same can be said of Christianity, of course, most obviously during the
Reformation, but before and after as well. Neither alchemy nor Christianity, in
other words, was monolithic or static. These four essays, therefore, rightly resist gen-
eralizations, drawing attention instead to some particularly fruitful and focused
examples of places where the intersection of alchemy and Christianity might yield
insight into both. It is my hope that these essays may serve as models for future
work on this topic.
In focusing on the relationships between alchemy and religion, the four contribu-
tors to this issue depart in some ways from recent work in the history of alchemy,
which has emphasized the revisionist project of rescuing the subject from the
realm of ‘pseudoscience’ by demonstrating its historical importance to the develop-
ment of modern science and medicine. In light of this work, it is now clear that med-
ieval and early modern European alchemy addressed not only intellectual problems,
such as matter theory, but also practical concerns such as mining, medicine, com-
merce, and the limits of technology. As several recent review essays and synthetic
works on the history of alchemy make clear, alchemy has now been ‘restored’ to
7
There are innumerable works on the topic of “science and religion,” however. For a point of entry into this broad
topic, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991); Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, paperback
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cam-
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, eds., The Word
and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007).
8
Tara Nummedal, “Words and Works in the History of Alchemy,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 330–37; Lawrence
M. Principe, “Alchemy Restored,” 310.
314 TARA NUMMEDAL
its rightful place in the history of science or medicine; in other words, historians have
shown that alchemy is related to the study of matter, experiment, vitalism, and print
culture, all of which lie at the heart of early modern science.9 Resituating alchemy as
central to the history of science and medicine has been crucial to demonstrating its
broad significance in medieval and early modern culture. In the process of detaching
alchemy from ‘the occult,’ however, many of us have minimized or neglected
alchemy’s religious dimension.10 This issue, therefore, highlights innovative work
that seeks to integrate our increasingly sophisticated understanding of alchemy as
science and medicine with new insights into alchemy’s contributions to and reliance
on theology, eschatology, hagiography, and exegetical techniques in Christian
Europe. Bringing these four essays together also provides an opportunity to draw
attention to some of the excellent scholarship that laid the groundwork for this
task by establishing some central areas of inquiry and providing important and
detailed studies of key figures and themes.
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The most obvious and well-known locus for exploring the question of alchemy
and religion has been alchemical metaphor and imagery, which both drew on Chris-
tianity to articulate laboratory processes and concepts, and also offered medieval
and early modern Europeans rich material for depicting, understanding, and
proving the truths of Christianity. Perhaps the most potent analogy was that
between the life of Christ and the stages of the philosophers’ stone. Just as Christ
had to be crucified in order to redeem humanity, the logic went, so too must the
alchemist’s materials undergo similar torments, even death and resurrection,
before they could in turn ‘redeem’ base metals as the philosophers’ stone. The
fourteenth-century Franciscan John of Rupescissa offers only one example from
this rich tradition.11 In his striking interpretation of an earlier alchemical author,
pseudo-Arnald of Villanova, Rupescissa likens the third stage of the philosophers’
stone, a distillation, to the crucifixion. Observing the digestion of alchemical
mercury and the ascent of its vapours to the head of the alembic, Rupescissa saw
Christ’s ascension on the cross: “mercury is placed in the bottom of the vessel for
dissolution,” he wrote, “because what ascends from there is pure and spiritual,
and converted into powdery air and exalted in the cross of the head of the
alembic just like Christ, as master Arnald [of Villanova] says.”12 Likewise, the
alchemical vessel that enclosed the final stage of the red stone resembled “Christ
inside the sepulcher.” Once the flames had brought out the internal redness of the
9
See, for example, the essays by Bruce Moran, Lawrence M. Principe, William R. Newman, Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang,
and Tara Nummedal in the Focus section on “Alchemy and the History of Science,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 300–37;
Marcos Martinón-Torres, “Some Recent Developments in the Historiography of Alchemy,” Ambix 58, no. 3 (2011):
215–37; Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, especially ch. 4; Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chem-
istry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
10
It is noteworthy, for instance, that the subject of “alchemy and religion” does not really feature at all in Marcos
Martinón-Torres’s fine 2011 review essay, “Some Recent Developments.”
11
Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 109–16.
12
John of Rupescissa, Liber lucis, as cited and translated in DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, 113
(hereafter Liber lucis).
ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 315
stone, the alchemist was to remove the red stone from its vessel so that it would
“ascend from the sepulcher of the Most Excellent King, shining and glorious, resus-
citated from the dead and wearing a red diadem, just as Master Arnald has
attested.”13 Although Rupescissa spun out this analogy in words, it appeared in
image as well, for example, in the successful Rosarium philosophorum, which
appeared in print in 1550 as the second volume of a compendium of alchemical texts.14
As Lean DeVun has argued particularly cogently, analogies such as that between
Christ and the philosophers’ stone were not just artefacts of the ‘colourful’ religious
language of the Middle Ages: Christian imagery offered a tool for both structuring
and communicating alchemical concepts.15 Rupescissa’s emphasis on red in this
passage—the red stone, Christ’s red diadem—suggested that the analogy between
Christ and the philosophers’ stone extended to Christ’s blood and the fecund,
redemptive powers it was commonly understood to bear as well. As DeVun
described this logic, “The creation of the stone through alchemy reenacts the narra-
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tive of the passion; hence, the stone may reenact the curative and salvific powers of
Christ.”16 Just as Christ could cleanse the soul, Rupescissa implied, so too could the
philosophers’ stone cleanse metals, absolving them of their impurities and trans-
forming them into the noble metals, silver and gold. Several centuries later, the
sixteenth-century German Lutheran alchemist Anna Zieglerin drew on the
meaning of Christ’s blood elaborated around late medieval blood relics to commu-
nicate the nature of her own golden elixir, which she (not accidentally) called the
lion’s blood. Like Christ’s blood, the lion’s blood was vivifying, abundant, and gen-
erative, capable of generating mineral, vegetable, and even human life; it was also
redemptive. Just as late medieval devotional writers emphasized the power of
Christ’s blood to wash, cleanse, restore, and cure both bodily and spiritual afflic-
tions, so too could Anna Zieglerin’s lion’s blood cure leprosy in humans and
metals alike. Such metaphors and analogies, in other words, were never ‘mere’
language, but constitutive of alchemy itself.17
Zachary Matus’s essay in this issue demonstrates that Christianity offered alchem-
ical authors a great deal more than analogy or metaphor, however. Examining the
alchemical writings of Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294), Matus locates the deep
roots of the Franciscan friar’s ideas about the prolongation of life via the alchemical
elixir in contemporary understanding of the resurrected body. Bacon believed that
the elixir could restore the body’s health by balancing its complexion and harnessing
13
Liber lucis, 118.
14
Cyriacus Jacob, ed., De alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum, quorum catalogum sequens pagella
indicabit. Cum gratia & privilegio Caesareo., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1550). For a modern facsimile, with
German translation and commentary, see Joachim Telle, Rosarium philosophorum: Ein alchemisches Florilegium
des Spätmittelalters. Faksimile der illustrierten Erstausgabe Frankfurt 1550, trans. Lutz Claren und Joachim
Huber, 2 vols. (Weinheim: VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992).
15
DeVun, “Metaphor and Alchemy,” ch. 6 in Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, and DeVun, “‘Human
Heaven.’”
16
DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, 118.
17
Tara Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, ed.
Elaine Yuen Tien Leong and Alisha Rankin (Aldershot, England, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 125–41.
316 TARA NUMMEDAL
the celestial quality of incorruptibility. Interestingly, Bacon also argued that the elixir
could improve the individual’s moral qualities and instil superior cognitive powers in
the soul. In order to articulate these qualities of the alchemical body, Matus argues,
Bacon turned not only to natural philosophy and medicine, as we might expect, but
also to formal theology and hagiography that touched on the soul and the bodies of
the resurrected dead.
If, as Matus shows, Christianity could inspire the development of new alchemical
concepts and practices, then the reverse was true as well. That is to say, alchemy
could also offer medieval and early modern Europeans a tool for structuring, com-
municating, and confirming religious (particularly eschatological) concepts. Again,
Rupescissa offers an excellent example. Among historians of science, Rupescissa is
perhaps best known for his treatise on the quintessence (De quinta essentia). He
referred to the quintessence, essentially alcohol produced by distilling wine, as
“human heaven (caelum),” which, as DeVun has noted, had the dual meaning of
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the sky and heaven in a theological sense. Accordingly, Rupescissa’s distilled quintes-
sence was analogous to the ‘fifth element’ from which, according to Aristotle, the
celestial sphere was composed, and that Rupescissa argued could balance the
human complexion and thus preserve the human body. However, it was also an
extract of theological heaven, in the sense that the quintessence could grant
certain humans the incorruptibility that they would otherwise only obtain after
death and resurrection. The point of this, for Rupescissa, was to allow elect ‘evan-
gelical men’ the strength to battle Antichrist and withstand the ordeals of the Last
Days before the end of time. In other words, DeVun has argued, certain men
would obtain the post-resurrection body, the reward of the next world, before the
Last Day, in earth’s final moments. The point, according to DeVun, is that it was
in part an alchemical technology, distillation, which allowed Rupescissa to
develop and articulate his innovative theology of a millennium on earth in which
the boundary between heaven and earth would give way on the brink of the
eschaton.18
Medieval and early modern alchemists found many other analogies between their
alchemy and their Christianity. Spirits, bodies, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection,
and incarnation all resonated deeply both in alchemical and soteriological or escha-
tological contexts, and therefore it is not difficult to find alchemical imagery (rhe-
torical and visual) in ‘religious’ writings and, conversely, ‘religious’ imagery in
alchemical writings.19 Textual intersections between alchemy and Christianity
also extended to the practice of biblical exegesis. Genesis offered a particularly com-
pelling site of potential concordance between alchemy and scripture because it
18
DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, and “‘Human Heaven.’” See also DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaph-
rodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 193–218,
which argues that the alchemical rebis stimulated new thinking about Christ’s divinity.
19
See, for example, Chiara Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa margarita novella of
Petrus Bonus of Ferrara,” Ambix 20, no. 3 (1973): 178–79; Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique:
XIVe-XVe siècles (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982); Joachim Telle, Sol und Luna: Literar- und alchemiegeschichtliche
Studien zu einem altdeutschen Bildgedicht. Mit Text- und Bildanhang (Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag, 1980).
ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 317
Adam’s longevity depended on the Tree of Life, she shows, and proposed methods
to reproduce its effects alchemically in the post lapsarian world.
As Peter Forshaw notes in his contribution to this issue, some alchemists also
seized on one of the more novel exegetical techniques that emerged in the Renais-
sance, namely Cabala, a Christian reworking of the Jewish mystical tradition of
Kabbalah developed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin.
Alchemical authors (particularly, although not exclusively, Paracelsians) deployed
innovative cabalistic exegetical techniques in some surprising and creative ways,
both to unravel familiar alchemical texts in new ways and to craft new ones. “Cabal-
chemical” scholars attributed numerical values to words, thus revealing hidden links
to other words or, as in one instance, insight into the weights, proportions of sub-
stances in laboratory procedures. They constructed complicated ‘Cabalistic’ etymol-
ogies, emblems, and layered alchemical words, drew on Cabala’s image as
knowledge handed down from Moses to bolster alchemical claims to access divine
secrets, or deployed Cabala and alchemy simultaneously as complementary means
of exploring God’s revelations. In detailing a wide range of ways in which
alchemy and Cabala (even, in one instance, Jewish Kabbalah) intersected in early
modern Europe, Forshaw’s piece serves as an important caveat. In the wake of
Enlightenment and later efforts to frame alchemy as inherently ‘mystical,’ it may
seem natural to us today that alchemists would gravitate to Cabala, or vice versa.
What Forshaw demonstrates, however, is that this connection was never inevitable.
Rather, it was forged in the Renaissance only with great effort and through the extra-
ordinary creativity of authors who were willing to experiment with novel methods in
order to reach ever greater insights into nature and scripture.21
20
Peter Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions: Orthodox Responses to the Alchemical Exegesis of Genesis,” in The Word and
the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (Basingstoke,
England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See also Janacek, Alchemical Belief, and Michael Thomson
Walton, Genesis and the Chemical Philosophy: True Christian Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,
AMS Studies in the Renaissance (Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 2011).
318 TARA NUMMEDAL
21
Paracelsus was particularly influential in this connection by emphasizing God’s double revelation in the “mutually
revelatory” books of nature and scripture. Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions,” 112.
22
Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations”; Chiara Crisciani, “Opus and sermo: The Relationship
between Alchemy and Prophecy (12th–14th Centuries),” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 4–24.
23
Crisciani, “Opus and sermo,” 22, 21.
ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 319
the coming of the Day of Judgment. In the late Middle Ages and especially in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Europeans’ conviction that the Last
Days were at hand led them to scour the books of Nature and Scripture for signs
of God’s plan, alchemists’ ability to confirm prophecy through their laboratory oper-
ations was no trifling matter.24 Of course alchemists promoted the practical uses of
their art during the End Times as well. Rupescissa’s elixir would restore the bodies of
the evangelical men in their final battles with Antichrist, while the ‘lion’s blood’ of
the sixteenth-century Lutheran, Anna Zieglerin, promised to help to restore the
lost fecundity of the post-lapsarian world, contributing to a rejuvenation of
nature in the earth’s final moments.25 The connection between alchemy and escha-
tology appears to have been particularly powerful: alchemy not only confirmed bib-
lical and other prophecies about the operations of nature and the unfolding of
earthly time, but also offered true Christians tools with which to engage the immi-
nent Last Days, either by withstanding the tribulations of the End Times, or by
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restoring the world in its final moments. Even Martin Luther appreciated the way
in which alchemical work could, in a sense, ratify prophecies about the fate of the
world.26
As these examples show, individual practitioners found a wide range of pro-
ductive synergies among the ideas, practices, and techniques that constituted their
religious and alchemical work. While these connections are perhaps most obvious
after what some scholars have termed the ‘religious turn’ in fourteenth-century
alchemy, when texts such as Petrus Bonus’s Margarita pretiosa novella (New Pearl
of Great Price), Aurora consurgens (The Rising Dawn), and Buch der Heiligen Drei-
faltigkeit (The Book of the Holy Trinity) increasingly presented alchemy as a kind of
divine knowledge or donum dei,27 these essays make it clear that alchemists, clerics,
theologians, and others also located powerful connections both before and after this
moment. Indeed, the continuities that run through these four essays beg the question
of whether it is possible to identify any particular turning points in the history of
alchemy in Christian Europe.
Given the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation, for example, we might
ask whether it changed anything about the relationship between alchemy and Chris-
tianity. Certainly one can find both Protestants and Catholics pursuing alchemy after
the Reformation, so it would be far too simple to map alchemy crudely onto confes-
sion. Nevertheless, efforts to locate concordances between Christianity and alchemy
seem to have become particularly controversial in the wake of the Reformations of
24
Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the German Reformation (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1988); Herbert Breger, “Elias Artista—A Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science,” in
Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Novotny (Dor-
drecht and Boston: D. Reidell Publishing Company, 1984); Walter Pagel, “The Paracelsian Elias Artista and the
Alchemical Tradition,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 16 (1981): 6–19.
25
DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time and Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations.”
26
See n. 1.
27
Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy”; William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to
Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 82–97.
320 TARA NUMMEDAL
the sixteenth century, which placed the interpretation of Scripture at centre stage.
The always contentious Lutheran Andreas Libavius, for example, objected to
those (such as the Paracelsians Oswald Croll and Gerard Dorn) who,
are advanced to such a degree of impiety that they have applied to the Stone the highest
benefits of the Son of God, his birth, passion, death, resurrection, the symbols of the
Christian faith, [from the] chapters … of Genesis … and other parts of the heavenly
teaching, as if the foundation of all wisdom were in the Stone.28
to reconcile Catholicism with his theory of seminal principles, which was grounded
in his knowledge of transmutation. This openness may have receded when it came to
theological ideas (such as transubstantiation) that were at the heart of confessional
identity, however.33
The relationship between alchemy and institutionalized religion had certainly
been strained before,34 and it may have become even more tense after the sixteenth
century. Nevertheless, individual alchemists and theologians found potent synergies
between alchemical imagery and the central events in sacred history, including the
formation of the world in Genesis, the life of Christ, or the Last Days. They explored
these connections as scholars through biblical exegesis and as practitioners by
drawing parallels between laboratory operations and the crucifixion or incarnation.
Alchemy could be deployed not only as analogy, but also literally, as a means to
prepare medicines that would protect the elect during the tribulations of the End
Times or to redeem a fallen natural world. These connections between alchemy
and Christianity were not trivial or incidental, as they could structure, communicate,
and even prove fundamental truths. While Protestant biblical literalism might have
32
R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the German Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989).
33
Martha Baldwin, “Alchemy and the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth Century: Strange Bedfellows?,” Ambix 40,
no. 2 (1993): 41–64; Margaret D. Garber, “Transitioning from Transubstantiation to Transmutation: Catholic
Anxieties over Chymical Matter Theory at the University of Prague,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the
History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History
Publications/USA, 2007), 63–76. Sylvain Matton’s Philosophie et alchimie à la Renaissance et à l’âge classique,
vol. I, Scolastique et alchimie (XVI e-XVII e siècles) (Paris: S.É.H.A; Milan: Arché, 2009) contains numeous texts
that touch on these questions; see especially 1–225 for Jesuit texts related to alchemy.
34
The fourteenth century, for example, saw an increasingly tense relationship between alchemists and the institutional
church. Several orders banned their members from studying or practicing alchemy, and Pope John XXII (1316–1334)
condemned the art in his well-known 1317 decretal, “Spondent quas non exhibent.” These condemnations derived in
part from a concern with counterfeiting, but also out of a worry that alchemists who viewed alchemy as a type of
divine revelation were skirting heterodoxy. See Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy”; Crisciani and Guglielmo
Fabri, Il Papa e l’alchimia: Felice V, Guglielmo Fabri e l’elixir (Roma: Viella, 2002), 45–46; William R. Newman,
“Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” Isis 80 (1989): 339–41, and Newman, “Alchemy
and the Art-Nature Debate,” chap. 2 in Promethean Ambitions.
322 TARA NUMMEDAL
the intellectual, social, and political nature of alchemists’ work. Most of all,
however, these contributions underscore the importance of anchoring these kinds
of connections in the words and works of individual alchemists and the specific reli-
gious contexts in which they operated. This precision is particularly important,
given how complex and fluid both alchemy and religion were (and are). It is only
through such careful, focused work that we can avoid vague and anachronistic gen-
eralizations about alchemy being somehow intrinsically or uniquely ‘religious,’
‘spiritual,’ or ‘mystical,’ and come to understand, instead, precisely how and why
alchemists, exegetes, and theologians worked so hard to forge connections
between their alchemical and religious endeavours in medieval and early modern
Christian Europe.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jennifer Rampling for inviting me to guest edit this issue of Ambix,
and for her innumerable consultations and contributions along the way.
Notes on contributor
Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Science and
Technology Studies Program at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy
and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago University Press, 2007) and is
currently completing “The Lion’s Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and Apocalypse in
Reformation Germany.” Address: Department of History, Box N, Brown University,
Providence, RI 02912, USA; E-mail: nummedal@brown.edu