Ambix

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Mercury and Sulphur among the High Medieval

Alchemists: From Rāzī and Avicenna to Albertus
Magnus and Pseudo-Roger Bacon

William R. Newman

To cite this article: William R. Newman (2014) Mercury and Sulphur among the High Medieval
Alchemists: From Rāzī and Avicenna to Albertus Magnus and Pseudo-Roger Bacon, Ambix,
61:4, 327-344, DOI: 10.1179/1745823414Y.0000000004

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1745823414Y.0000000004

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 ambix, Vol. 61 No. 4, November, 2014, 327–344

Mercury and Sulphur among the High

Medieval Alchemists: From Rāzı̄ and
Avicenna to Albertus Magnus and
Pseudo-Roger Bacon
William R. Newman
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
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This essay challenges the often expressed view that the principles of metals,
namely mercury and sulphur, were generally viewed by alchemists as being
of a ‘metaphysical’ character that made them inaccessible to the tools and
operations of the laboratory. By examining a number of Arabo-Latin and
Latin alchemical texts in circulation before the end of the thirteenth century,
the author presents evidence that most alchemists of the period considered
mercury and sulphur to be materials subject to techniques of purification in
the same way that naturally occurring salts and minerals could be freed of
their impurities or dross. The article also points to the immense influence
of Avicenna and Albertus Magnus in formulating the theory that mercury
and sulphur were compounds of different materials, containing both fixed
and unfixed components. Finally, the author briefly examines the relationship
between this materialist approach to the principles and the chymical atomism
of early modern authors who were deeply aware of medieval alchemical
literature.

Introduction: the state of the question

In reading historians of chemistry, one sometimes encounters the claim that mercury
and sulphur, the supposed components of metals, were believed by alchemists to be
‘metaphysical,’ ‘spiritual,’ or ‘ideal’ entities, in contrast to the material constituents
of things envisioned by eighteenth-century chemistry.1 According to this view,

1
A well-known example of this old claim can be found in Robert Siegfried and Betty Jo Dobbs, “Composition, A Neg-
lected Aspect of the Chemical Revolution,” Annals of Science 24 (1968): 275–93; see especially on 292. More
recently, the claim has been adopted by Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Le Fevre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century

© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2014 DOI 10.1179/1745823414Y.0000000004
 328 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

alchemists generally acknowledged that their principles were incapable of being

handled or observed, as they were too pure and ‘high’ to be isolated by means attain-
able in a workshop or laboratory.2 The origin of these claims is obscure, but they are
severely undercut by several considerations. First, it is not clear what is meant by
terms like ‘metaphysical,’ ‘spiritual,’ or ‘ideal.’ When historians of chemistry use
these terms, do they mean to imply that the alchemical principles were actually
immaterial, or merely that in metals they were inaccessible to the unaided senses,
or do they mean something else? Second, is it not historically suspect to make
such categorical claims about a subject as diverse as alchemy over its entire chrono-
logical development? It may well be the case that the discovery of new analytical
technologies such as those employing the mineral acids or the use of stibnite in assay-
ing led to revisions and alterations to older theories of material composition among
alchemists between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The goal of
the present article is not to trace out the influence of such technological develop-
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ments—important as they were—on metallurgy and alchemy, but rather to

propose a different way of thinking about the alchemical principles. What I want
to suggest is that the sulphur and mercury of High Medieval alchemy were
usually the material substances that share those names on the modern periodic
table: yet unlike our modern elements, the medieval principles were often viewed
in the same light as impure ores and other minerals that had to be refined before
use.3 In other words, undesirable features such as the volatility of mercury and
the combustibility of sulphur were treated as characteristics that could be
removed by eliminating material impurities from the respective principle. This elim-
ination would be accomplished by refining the mercury or sulphur and arriving at a
purer form of it, in the same way that the friability and lustreless appearance of
many ores could be removed in the course of their conversion to metals by processes
such as washing, roasting, and smelting.4 This was a perfectly reasonable approach

1
Continued
Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), who employ the term “spiritual” instead of “metaphysical,” but with
much the same meaning; see on 39–40 et passim.
2
For a rather early example of this viewpoint, see Marie Boas [Hall], Robert Boyle and Seventeenth Century Chem-
istry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 83–86. A somewhat similar perspective underlies the otherwise
laudable book of Frederic L. Holmes, Eighteenth Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise (Berkeley: Office
for History of Science and Technology, University of California at Berkeley, 1989). Holmes intended to extend
various features associated with the Chemical Revolution, such as “operational interpretations of composition,”
back to the French Academicians of the seventeenth century. See Holmes, Eighteenth Century Chemistry, 8–37. In
the case of earlier chymists such as Paracelsus, Holmes asserted that “the principles were more spiritual than
material”; see Holmes, “Analysis by Fire and Solvent Extractions: The Metamorphosis of a Tradition,” Isis 62
(1971): 129–48, particularly on 132; and Holmes, “Chemistry in the Académie Royale des Sciences,” Historical
Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 34 (2003): 41–68, especially on 45–46.
3
Sébastien Moureau has pointed out to me in private communication that the “purification” approach does not fully
capture the complexity found in the Arabo-Latin De anima in arte alchemiae, which he is currently editing (there is
also an early modern imprint in the Artis chemicae principes, Avicenna atque Geber [Basel: Petrus Perna, 1572]). It is
not surprising that there would have been more than one approach to the alchemical principles in texts of Islamic
origin, given the wide dispersion of alchemical theory and practice there. I do not claim universality for the purifi-
cation approach, only its widespread character.
4
Some alchemists even thought that the four elements themselves could be separated by the technology of the labora-
tory, especially by means of distillation. This is a central feature of the alchemical corpus ascribed to Jābir ibn
Ḥ ayyān, which is also found in the pseudo-Avicennian De anima in arte alchemiae. See Paul Kraus, Jābir ibn
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 329

based on the parallel refining of atraments, boraxes, and salts that one finds in
Arabic alchemy, and also on the refining of metals themselves. We do not normally
think of the metallic iron disguised under the form of powdery red rust, or the
copper lurking within verdigris, as ‘metaphysical’ or ‘spiritual’—why then should
we import those modes of expression into High Medieval alchemy when the original
actors did not employ them?
In the following discussion I will limit my analysis to texts that were composed
independently of the two great classics of medieval chrysopoetic alchemy, the
Summa perfectionis of Geber and the Testamentum traditionally attributed to the
Catalan philosopher Ramon Lull.5 Given the huge influence of the Geberian and
Lullian corpora on subsequent alchemists, one can easily fall into the trap of confus-
ing the part for the whole by focusing on one or both of these traditions. In this
paper, I will consider a slightly earlier period, when alchemical traditions were
still in a state of flux and Arabo-Latin sources provided the most authoritative per-
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spective on the aurific art. I will therefore focus on four texts—the Liber de conge-
latione et conglutinatione lapidum (also called De mineralibus) of Avicenna (Ibn
Sı̄nā, d. 1037 CE), which is a genuine translation from Arabic; the Liber secretorum
de voce Bubacaris, which is based on a genuine work by Abū Bakr Muḥ ammad ibn
Zakariyyā’ al-Rāzı̄ (d. 925 or 935 CE); the Liber mineralium or De mineralibus of
Albertus Magnus, which contains a careful sifting and analysis of mostly Arabo-
Latin alchemical texts; and finally, the Breve breviarium attributed spuriously to
Roger Bacon: this final text was clearly dependent on Albertus Magnus despite
the author’s apparent attempt to insert himself into the dispute between Bacon
and his opponents within the Franciscan order. These four works can be taken as
representative of four stages in the development of alchemy independent of the
Summa and the Testamentum, comprising translation, reworking, scholastic analy-
sis, and full-blown employment of scholastic themes and techniques in crafting a
theory and practice of alchemy.

Avicenna and the Rāzı ̄an tradition on mercury and sulphur

A good place to start is with the De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum of the
Persian philosopher Avicenna, also known as De mineralibus.6 This short but
4
Continued
Ḥ ayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’institut français, 1942),
vol. 2, 4–18. As Sébastien Moureau has pointed out to me, this practice appears in dictio 7, Chapter 2 (409–10) of the
1572 edition of the De anima in arte alchemiae.
5
See William R. Newman, The “Summa perfectionis” of pseudo-Geber (Leiden: Brill, 1991) and Michela Pereira and
Barbara Spaggiari, Il “Testamentum” alchemico attribuito a Raimondo Lullo (Firenza: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999).
6
In a useful recent article, Jean-Marc Mandosio and Carla di Martino argue that Avicenna’s text should actually be
referred to as De mineralibus, since the name De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum properly refers only to the
first chapter of the translated text; see their “La ‘Météorologie’ d’Avicenne (Kitāb al-Shifā’ V) et sa diffusion dans le
monde latin,” in Wissen über Grenzen: Arabisches Wissen und lateinisches Mittelalter, ed. Andreas Speer and Lydia
Wegener (New York: De Gruyter, 2006), 406–23. For the present article, I have kept the name De congelatione et
conglutinatione lapidum, if only because this title has come to be widely recognized in the Anglo-Saxon world as
a result of Holmyard and Mandeville’s 1927 edition.
 330 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

influential section of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Shifā was translated into Latin at least
twice in the Middle Ages.7 The most important of the translations, done by
Alfred of Sareshel at some point in the second half of the twelfth century, often cir-
culated with the translation of Aristotle’s Meteorology Book IV made by Henricus
Aristippus and sometimes with the newer translation of the Meteorology made by
William of Moerbeke in the thirteenth century.8 Because of its manuscript trans-
mission, Avicenna’s text looked to contemporaries as though it was the conclusion
of Aristotle’s Meteorology IV; this fact lent the text considerable prestige and pro-
vided it with an authority that it might otherwise have lacked.9 Although Avicenna
famously attempts to rebut chrysopoeia in another passage of his De congelatione,
the text nonetheless accepts that metals are formed within the earth from mercury
and sulphur that differ in colour and purity.10 There are dirty and clean sulphurs
and mercuries, and these can vary in colour as well, according to Avicenna. Only
a very clean and pure mercury and sulphur will yield gold; the converse will
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produce lead or iron.

What is of concern to us, however, is that Avicenna postulates that not only the
metals, but mercury and sulphur themselves, are compounded from more primitive
ingredients. As he puts it

The wateriness of the sulphurous [sulphureorum] is mixed with earth in a strong com-
mixture with fervency of heat until they are made unctuous, and then they are coagu-
lated by cold … Quicksilver is as a water which is mixed with a very subtle,
sulphurous earth in a strong mixture until it does not rest on a flat surface, and this is
due to the great dryness which is in it, and therefore it does not adhere to anything touch-
ing it. And its whiteness is from the brightness of that water, and from the whiteness of
the subtle earth that is in it.11

According to this influential theory both sulphur and mercury are composed of an
earthy and a watery component. Clearly Avicenna is talking about ordinary sulphur
and mercury, since he refers to the ‘unctuosity’ of the former when molten and to the
7
Mandosio and di Martino, “La ‘Météorologie’,” 406. As the authors point out, the fifth part of Avicenna’s Kitāb
al-Shifā’, which contained his treatment of meteorology, was translated once in full; additionally, two partial trans-
lations were made—De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum, and De diluviis.
8
For the date of this translation, which is somewhat earlier than the traditionally accepted one, see Jean-Marc Man-
dosio, “Humanisme ou barbarie? Fonnes de la latinité et mémoire de l’Antiquité dans quelques traductions médié-
vales de textes philosophiques arabes,” in Écritures latines de la mémoire de l’Antiquité au XVI e siècle, ed. Hélène
Casanova-Robin et Perrine Galand (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010), 227–63; see 244–45. I thank Sébastien
Moureau for bringing this article to my attention.
9
See Mandosio and di Martino, “La ‘Météorologie’,” especially on 411–19.
10
Avicenna did not of course invent the sulphur–mercury theory of the metals, which goes back at least as far as the
Book of the Secret of Creation (Kitāb sirr al-Khalı̄qa) attributed to the pseudonymous Balı̄nū s. For a brief introduc-
tion to this obscure figure, see the entry by Martin Plessner, “Balı̄nū s,” New Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1986), vol. 1, 994–96. See also Ursula Weisser, Das ‘Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung’ von
pseudo-Apollonius von Tyana (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980).
11
Unfortunately, there is no critical edition of the De congelatione et conglutinatione available today. The Avicennae de
congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum compiled by E. J. Holmyard and D. C. Mandeville (Paris: Geuthner, 1927)
merely copies a single base manuscript and provides alternative readings in the apparatus with no attempt to emend
the obviously quite defective text. In the passage that I have translated here, I have followed the text provided in Jean-
Jacques Manget, Bibliotheca chemica curiosa (Geneva: 1702), vol. 1, 636–38. Needless to say, this uncontrolled text
should also be taken with a large grain of salt. For the Latin passage, see 637B.
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 331

fact that the latter rolls around on a flat surface when touched and does not stick to
the object or finger that is touching it. As the text continues, he also adds that
mercury is congealed by vapours from molten lead, presumably referring to the
formation of an amalgam, and by vapour of sulphur, an obvious reference to the
manufacture of artificial cinnabar.
Despite his affirmation of the sulphur–mercury theory of metallic composition,
Avicenna of course rejects human attempts at replicating nature’s work on
metals with his famous dictum repeated throughout the subsequent history of
alchemy—“Sciant artifices alkimie species metallorum non posse transmutari”
(Let the alchemists know that the species of metals cannot be transmuted). Hence,
we cannot expect Avicenna to provide us with techniques for refining mercury
and sulphur in order to remove their normally occurring defects and thereby
provide the means of transmuting metals. If we turn to Arabo-Latin alchemical
texts proper, however, such advice is readily forthcoming. An excellent example
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can be found in the Liber secretorum de voce Bubacaris, a work that the historian
of Arabic alchemy Julius Ruska studied extensively in the 1930s. In a long article
published in 1936, Ruska argued that the Liber secretorum de voce Bubacaris
was a reworking (Bearbeitung) of Rāzı̄’s Kitāb al-Asrār, which had already been
translated into Latin as the Liber Ebu baccar et Raisy (as found in the famous
Codex Speciale, Palermo Biblioteca Comunale 4QqA10). Although an exact
textual study of the relationship between the Liber secretorum de voce Bubacaris
and the Liber Ebu baccar et Raisy remains a desideratum, Ruska’s work placed it
beyond doubt that the Liber secretorum descended from the genuine work of
Rāzı̄. In the absence of a close study of the two works, however, I will refer to the
reworking by its title, rather than assuming that all of its ideas go back to Rāzı̄.
The Liber secretorum de voce Bubacaris contains ideas about the nature and com-
position of sulphur and mercury that are similar to those of Avicenna, despite the
fact that the work is a practica rather than a treatise of natural philosophy.
Unlike Avicenna, however, Rāzı̄ teaches the reader how to operate on mercury
and sulphur for chrysopoetic purposes:

The operation for quicksilver is washing, then to take away its humidity … The oper-
ation of orpiment and sulphur is that they be whitened and freed from their burning
and from the fat that they have.12

As in the case of Avicenna, the Liber secretorum proceeds from the belief that
mercury contains an earthy component and a humidity: in order to prepare one’s
quicksilver for alchemical purposes, it must therefore be refined by the washing
away of any dirtiness and the removal of its wetness. Similarly, the unctuosity of
sulphur and that of the closely related orpiment (arsenic sulphide) must be
removed; as the Liber secretorum reveals elsewhere in the text, this is the origin of
12
Liber secretorum de voce bubacaris, in MS Paris, BN lat. 6514, fol. 103ra: “Operatio argenti vivi est lavatio deinde
levare eius humiditatem … Operatio auripigmenti et sulphuris est ut dealbentur et liberentur ab ardore eorum et
pinguedine quam habent.”
 332 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

their combustibility. In order to drive home the point that the Liber secretorum is
talking about ordinary quicksilver, not some ‘metaphysical’ analogue of mercury,
it is necessary to quote one more passage from the text:

There are two manners of sublimation of quicksilver, of which one is for the white [i.e.
for argyropoeia] and one for the red [i.e. for chrysopoeia proper]. But in each sublima-
tion there are two secrets. One is that that the humidity be taken [recipiatur], the other
that you make it hard and dry and its humidity is thus removed.13

The Liber secretorum then goes on to describe a multi-stage process of subliming

mercury after grinding it with ‘medicines’ until it is ‘killed’ (i.e. no longer ‘quick,’ or
liquid).14 The mercury should then be sublimed with dregs such as alum, atrament,
salt, sulphur, calx, glass, oak ashes, gall ashes, burnt bones, marcasite, and ground
brick. The idea, clearly, is that these materials will ‘dry out’ the quicksilver, thereby
making it fit to combine in a permanent way with metals and convert them into
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silver or gold. In some instances, sublimation processes like those described by

Rāzı̄ would lead to the production of corrosive sublimate (HgCl2), which would
satisfy the alchemist’s criteria that the mercury be dry and white (hence ‘clean’).
From the alchemist’s perspective, this product would not be a compound, but
rather the mercury itself, which had now been liberated from the undesirable
materials previously clinging to it. There is no reason to assume that the Liber secre-
torum has anything else in mind other than a simple refining of quicksilver to free it
of its impurities. Indeed, as anyone who consults the German translation that Ruska
made of Rāzı̄’s Kitāb al-Asrār can see, the original text is filled with similar recipes
for purifying and refining a host of mineral products ranging from sal ammoniac
and orpiment to boraxes and alkalis.15
Various other Arabo-Latin practicae, such as the tremendously popular De alumi-
nibus et salibus of pseudo-Rāzı̄ and the less well-known Liber claritatis totius alki-
micae artis attributed to Geber, take much the same approach as the Liber
secretorum de voce Bubacaris.16 Mercury and sulphur are treated as ordinary
materials to be operated on in the alchemical workspace, not as hypothetical
bearers of properties. The De aluminibus et salibus is particularly interesting on
this score, since the text explicitly invokes what John Norris has dubbed the
“mineral exhalation theory of metallogenesis,” according to which subterranean
fumes of mercury and sulphur were thought to combine and form the metals:17
13
Liber secretorum de voce bubacaris, in MS Paris, BN lat. 6514, fol. 103ra–103rb: “Sublimationis argenti vivi due
sunt manieres quarum una est pro albedine et alia pro rubedine tamen in unaquaque sublimatione sunt duo
secreta ut unum est ut recipiatur humiditas aliud est ut facias illud durum et siccum et sic deperditur eius humiditas.”
14
For the polyvalent meanings attached to the term “quick” or “living” (ḥ ayy) in Arabic and Arabo-Latin alchemy, see
Sébastien Moureau’s glossary in his forthcoming edition and study of the pseudo-Avicennian De anima in arte
alchemiae, which he has kindly shown me in draft form.
15
Julius Ruska, Al-Rāzı̄’s Buch Geheimnis der Geheimnisse, in Quellen und Studeint zur Geschichte der Naturwis-
senschaften unde der Medizin, vol. 6 (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1937). See especially on 100–26, and 220–25.
16
See Ernst Darmstaedter, “Liber claritatis totius alkimicae artis,” Archivio di Storia della Scienza 6 (1925): 319–30; 7
(1926): 257–65; 8 (1927): 95–103; 8 (1927): 214–29; 9 (1928): 63–80; 9 (1928): 191–208; and 9 (1928): 462–82.
17
John A. Norris, “The Mineral Exhalation Theory of Metallogenesis in Pre-Modern Mineral Science,” Ambix 53
(2006): 43–65.
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 333

You should know that the mineral bodies are vapours which are thickened and coagu-
lated according to the working of nature over a long time. What is first coagulated in
them is quicksilver and sulphur. And these two are the origins of the mineral. And
they are “the water” and “the oil.” A temperate concoction has remained with them
with heat and humidity until they are congealed, and from them the [mineral] bodies
are generated. Then they are gradually mutated until they become silver and gold in a
thousand years.18

In both of the partial editions of the De aluminibus et salibus that are currently
available, Pseudo-Rāzı̄’s description of metallogenesis from the two principles
immediately follows a succession of recipes for purifying and congealing ordinary
mercury. These recipes range from the sublimation of quicksilver with salt and atra-
ment to the manufacture of vermilion and amalgamation: in short, they belong to
the traditional corpus of mercurial alchemy conspicuous in the work of the
genuine Rāzı̄. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the mercury and sulphur of
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the De aluminibus et salibus consist of the ordinary materials that we know by

those terms today, although the text views these principles as subjects that require
purification and refining. Since the case is the same for the other Arabo-Latin
texts that I have briefly surveyed here, we may now pass to the Liber mineralium
of Albertus Magnus, a work that drew upon these sources and tried to bring
them into conformity with the scholastic natural philosophy of the mid-thirteenth
century.

Sulphur and mercury in the Liber mineralium of Albertus Magnus

It is well known that Albertus Magnus composed his own Liber mineralium at some
time between 1250 and 1254 after failing to find a comprehensive treatment of min-
erals by Aristotle. Thanks to an important study by Robert Halleux, we now have a
solid understanding of the diligence with which Albert combed through mineralogi-
cal and alchemical sources to rectify this gap in the Aristotelian corpus.19 What is
less widely appreciated is the remarkable influence that Albert exercised on
alchemists themselves, a subject that deserves extensive further study on its own
terms. For the moment, however, I will restrict myself to Albert’s own theory of
mercury and sulphur, which represents a major development when compared to
18
Although there are two modern printings of De aluminibus et salibus, there is no fully adequate edition of the text at
present. The text is found in Robert Steele, “Practical Chemistry in the Twelfth Century: Rasis de aluminibus et
salibus,” Isis 12 (1929): 10–46, and in Julius Ruska, Das Buch der Alaune und Salze (Berlin: Verlag Chemie,
1935). Steele’s text is based on the copy of De aluminibus et salibus found in MS Paris, BN lat. 6514, to which he
has compared London, British Library MS Arundel 164 and the extracts in printed versions of Vincent of Beauvais’s
Specula. Ruska’s text is based on a version of the De aluminibus et salibus found in a sixteenth-century imprint—
John of Garland’s De mineralibus liber (Basel, 1560) which Ruska compares to Steele’s edition. I have translated
the text of Ruska here, incorporating the suggestions that he makes in the notes to his own German translation.
See Ruska, 62, 95. The passage is found in Steele on 27. For the Hebrew tradition of the De aluminibus et
salibus, see Gabriele Ferrario, “Origin and Transmission of the ‘Liber de aluminibus et salibus’,” in Chymists and
Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chymistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Sagamore
Beach: Science History Publications, 2006), 137–48.
19
Robert Halleux, “Albert le grand et l’alchimie,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 66 (1982): 57–80.
 334 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

the simple mineral exhalation theory described above. In his chapter on the matter
out of which metals are made, Albert argues that the two principles, like many other
things, contain a twofold unctuosity or oiliness. What Albert has in mind, for the
moment, is sulphur, which he views as a compound. The standard text of the
Liber mineralium found in volume five of Auguste Borgnet’s Opera omnia is defec-
tive at this crucial point, so I will correct it with the addition of a few words found in
two medieval manuscripts, Vaticanus palatinus latinus 978 and Marburg Universi-
tätsbibliothek B20 (MS 26), in my own translation. I have placed the added words in
pointed brackets; otherwise the translated passage comes from Borgnet:

The unctuosity in many things is double, one of which is as it were extrinsic <with an
intermixed, adust, feculent earthiness, and this is highly combustible and flammable.
But the other is intrinsic,> quite subtle, having nothing feculent or combustible mixed
in, and this is not flammable, but intrinsic to the thing, retained in its roots so that it
cannot be torn out and drained out by fire. And we have given as an example the
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liquor that is refined out of wine, in which [wine] there is a supernatant, flammable unc-
tuosity, accidental, as it were, and bound on. The other [unctuosity] is commixed to the
whole substance of the liquor itself, not separable from the liquor’s substance, except
with loss of the substance; and this is not combustible.20

The concept of a double unctuosity is taken almost verbatim by Albert from the
little-studied Quaestiones Nicolai Peripatetici, a work that also circulated under the
title De vaporibus and was sometimes attributed to Averroes.21 The concept of a
double humidity, one of which is flammable, is clearly based on the distillation of
ethanol from wine, a fact already noted by Albert’s translator Dorothy
Wyckoff.22 Just as wine contains a highly volatile, combustible material that can
be distilled off (ethanol), and a less volatile component that is not combustible, so
too does the metallic principle sulphur. Albert therefore continues to say that
normal sulphur contains a burning unctuosity that blackens and burns metals
when it is fused and dropped on them. For this reason, Albert adds, alchemists
20
Albertus Magnus, Liber mineralium, in B. Alberti Magni ratisbonensis episcopi, ordinis praedicatorum, opera
omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet (Paris: Ludovicus Vivès, 1890), vol. 5, 61. I reproduce the text of Borgnet corrected
against MSS Vat. Palat. 978, fol. 8rb, lines 20–23, and Marburg Universitätsbibliothek B20 (MS 26), fol. 140v
(9v), lines 10–11. I have placed the added lines in pointed brackets, retaining the medieval spellings. The only differ-
ence between the two manuscripts as far as the addition goes is that Marburg B20 (MS 26) lacks the “autem” before
“est intrinseca”: “duplex est unctuositas in multis rebus: quarum una est quasi extrinseca, subtilis valde, nihil faetu-
lentum vel cremabile habens admixtum: et haec non est inflammabilis, et intrinseca rei retenta in radicibus rei, ne per
ignem possit evelli et epotari: et nos dedimus de hoc exemplum in liquore, qui eliquatur ex vino, in quo una est unc-
tuositas supernatans inflammabilis, et facile astringibilis et quasi accidentalis. Altera commixta toti substantiae
liquoris ipsius, non separabilis ex ipsa substantia liquoris, nisi per defectionem substantiae: et haec non est
cremabilis.”
21
For the double humidity in Albert and in Nicolaus Peripateticus, see Newman, “Summa perfectionis” of pseudo-
Geber, 218–19. For more recent work on Nicolaus Peripateticus, see Sébastien Moureau, “Les sources alchimiques
de Vincent de Beauvais,” Spicae, Cahiers de l‘atelier Vincent de Beauvais 2 (2012): 5–118; consult especially 34–35.
A critical edition is found in Stanisław Wielgus, “Quaestiones Nicolai Peripatetici,” Mediaevalia Philosophica Polo-
norum 17 (1973): 57–155.
22
Dorothy Wyckoff, trans., Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 157,
n. 8. Unfortunately Wyckoff’s translation of this passage reproduced here is defective, as she has used Borgnet’s
text without consulting the manuscript tradition of the Liber mineralium. Hence I have retranslated the passage
for the present article.
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 335

advise that sulphur be washed in acid solutions and sublimed until its unctuosity is
removed and the sulphur can withstand fire without burning. As for quicksilver,
Albert first paraphrases Avicenna’s claim that it contains a liquid component
along with a subtle earth. In conformity with his theory of a twofold unctuosity,
however, Albert describes the moist component of mercury as a “subtle, unctuous,
humidity” (humidum subtile unctuosum), rather than a “water.”
Albert’s theory therefore postulates that mercury and sulphur each contain a vola-
tile component and a fixed one. Since the metals are themselves composed of the two
principles, it should follow that each metal should itself contain a fixed and a volatile
component, though the degree of fixity and volatility will vary with the particular
metal. A particularly instructive example can be found later in Albert’s text, when
he discusses the causes of burning in metals. Here the Universal Doctor has taken
the interesting step of dividing the metals’ principles into three rather than two unc-
tuosities. I quote this important passage from Dorothy Wyckoff’s translation of the
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Liber mineralium:

We know, therefore, that the ability of metals to be burnt is [due to] the Sulphur, and not
to the Quicksilver by itself. Furthermore, we also know that in anything that contains
very unctuous moisture mixed with earthiness, the moisture is of three kinds. One of
these is extremely airy and fiery, adhering to the surface, as a consequence of the
[upward] motion of those elements [Fire and Air], so that they always rise to the
surface of things in which they are mixed and combined. The second, close beneath
this, contains more wateriness floating about among the parts of the thing. The third
has its moisture firmly rooted and immersed in the parts and bounded in the combi-
nation; and therefore this is the only one that is not easily separated from the combi-
nation, unless the thing is totally destroyed. And therefore this must be the nature of
Sulphur.23

Here we can see that Albert has divided the extrinsic moisture into two types while
retaining the unitary character of the third, intrinsic humidity. His goal in making
this new bifurcation probably lay in the desire to have both a flammable and a
non-flammable type of unfixed humidity. Thus, the first extrinsic moisture is fiery
and airy, hence combustible, while the second is not, being composed of “wateri-
ness.” Albert then repeats his earlier observation that alchemists cleanse sulphur
by means of penetrating solutions such as “vinegar, and sour milk, and goats’
whey, and water of chickpeas and boys’ urine” and that they employ operations
such as boiling and sublimation. Now he tells us that this treatment removes the
first moisture, which is combustible, as well as the second, which merely “evaporates
in the fire.”24 Similar considerations emerge immediately after this passage when
Albert turns to quicksilver, although here Albert does not divide the extrinsic humid-
ity into combustible and merely evaporative types. Instead, following Avicenna, he
speaks of quicksilver as being composed of a watery moisture united with a subtle
23
Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals, 197.
24
Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals, 198.
 336 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

earth. Perhaps because Avicenna had described this inherent earth within mercury as
being “sulphurous,” Albert argues that there is an impure form of quicksilver that
can burn metals if it is too dirty or present in too great a quantity in a given metal.25
The passages from Albert’s Liber mineralium that we have examined so far focus
on his theory of extrinsic and intrinsic humidities and how these pertain to mercury
and sulphur. In order to see how his theory of three humidities plays out in the com-
position of individual metals, we need to look at a final passage. The fourth book of
the Liber mineralium treats each of the then-known metals independently, while the
chapter on silver presents the theory of three humidities quite clearly:

And we know from what has been said that both Sulphur and Quicksilver – and any-
thing else at all which, because of its constitution [complexione], is moist and liquefiable
by Fire – contains three [kinds of] moisture, just like living things, plants and animals.
One [kind of] moisture is thick and undigested [crassus et indigestus], rising to the
surface like grease, fat, or oil; and it is this that makes things inflammable. And
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the second is like the phlegmatic humour [phlegmaticus humectans] that moistens the
parts of things, but does not contribute to generation or growth. And the third is the
radical [radicalis] moisture saturating the essential parts of a thing; and because of
this moisture the parts [of things] are firm, and grow, and are nourished. We have
found that silver is hard and dry. And therefore it must have been thoroughly cleansed
of the two superfluous [kinds of] moisture, and the subtlety of the third is responsible for
its excellent mixture.26

The upshot of this passage is that silver, during its generation beneath the earth,
has been purged of the two extrinsic humidities that would cause excessive combust-
ibility and evaporation. In the same chapter, Albert explains that silver’s mercury is
“well digested and purified and mixed with extremely subtle material.” The two
extrinsic humidities of its sulphur, moreover, have been largely removed by “the
skill of nature.”27 Nonetheless, when silver is strongly heated, it has a foul, sulphur-
ous odour, revealing the presence of some remaining sulphur.
To summarize Albert’s position, then, each of the metals is composed of the two
principles, sulphur and mercury. But because sulphur and mercury contain their own
extrinsic, unfixed components, and also intrinsic, fixed ones, it follows that the
metals are also fixed or unfixed in varying degree. Moreover, a clever metallurgist
or alchemist can determine the presence or absence of the principles by examining
the characteristics of the given metal when subjected to an intense fire, as in the
case of heated silver’s sulphurous stench. And as we saw above, Albert thinks that
alchemists can remove the extrinsic components of sulphur, at least, by operations
involving sharp waters, boiling, and sublimation. Albert’s claim that quicksilver
25
Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals, 198, 207.
26
Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals, 219. Albert’s language of nourishment suggests strongly that he had
assimilated his belief in a third, intrinsic moisture to the medical theory of the humidum radicale, which he explicitly
discusses in other works. For Albert’s position in the High Medieval medical discussion focusing on the humidum
radicale, see Michael McVaugh, “The ‘Humidum Radicale’ in Thirteenth-Century Medicine,” Traditio 30 (1974):
259–83.
27
Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals, 220.
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 337

and sulphur have their own extrinsic and intrinsic components, and also his obser-
vation that these can be detected by heating the metal, would exercise considerable
influence in subsequent alchemy, above all in the Summa perfectionis of Geber and
the tradition stemming from it.28 But since the Summa is outside the limits of the
present paper, I will focus instead on an alchemical treatise that I believe to have
been composed independently of the Summa. Despite the fact that this text presents
itself as a work by Roger Bacon, all the evidence convinces one that it is actually an
attempt by a pseudonymous author to implement the theories of Albertus Magnus in
the realm of alchemical practice.29

Pseudo-Roger Bacon’s Breve breviarium

The Breve breviarium does not seem to have been attributed to Roger Bacon by acci-
dent, as often happens in the case of medieval manuscripts. The author of the text
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frames the preliminary theorica as a response to one Raymundus, whom it portrays

as an enemy of alchemy. This is possibly Raymundus Gaufredi (d. 1310), who
became minister general of the Franciscan order in 1289, during a time when
Bacon is supposed to have been held prisoner by the Friars Minor. It may be the
case, then, that the author of the Breve breviarium framed his work as a rebuttal
of anti-alchemical currents within the Fransciscan order. Beyond that, little can be
said at present about the origin of the text.30 The Breve breviarium presents an
alchemy that is focused exclusively on chrysopoeia. Indeed, the genuine Roger
Bacon’s project of prolongatio vitae assisted by alchemical techniques of purifying
the elements that would supposedly lead to the production of a corpus equale is
completely absent in the Breve breviarium.31 Instead, pseudo-Roger provides an
extensive theorica that explicitly uses Avicenna’s De congelatione (which
pseudo-Roger attributes to Aristotle) to rebut the supposed views of Raymundus.
According to the Breve breviarium, Raymundus has placed all his faith in an uncri-
tical reading of the famous anti-alchemical edict “Sciant artifices alkimie species
28
See Newman, “Summa perfectionis” of pseudo-Geber, 214–23.
29
For the inauthenticity of the Breve breviarium, see William R. Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the
Late Middle Ages,” Isis 80 (1989): 423–45; consult especially 441, n. 57. This claim has been developed further
recently in Antoine Calvet, “L’alchimie du pseudo-Albert le grand,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du
Moyen Âge 79 (2012): 115–60; see 155.
30
See Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), vol.
4, 15–17. See also George Molland, “Bacon, Roger (c. 1214–1292?),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1008?docPos=1 (accessed 3 May 2014). The identity of the “Raymundus”
in the Breve breviarium cannot be considered sure until the manuscript tradition has been thoroughly studied. I have
consulted Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 119, a fourteenth-century manuscript that contains the Breve breviar-
ium (fols. 64r–77v). On 64r, the author addresses “Pater Raymunde qui etiam solum quartum librum metheororum
credis.” In the margin, a much later hand has written “Raymundus Gaufridius.”
31
See William R. Newman, “An Overview of Roger Bacon’s Alchemy,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commem-
orative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 317–36; Newman, “The Philosophers’ Egg: Theory and
Practice in the Alchemy of Roger Bacon,” Micrologus 3 (1995): 75–101; Michela Pereira, “Teorie dell’elixir nell’al-
chimia latina medievale,” Micrologus, 3 (1995): 103–48; and Newman, “The Alchemy of Roger Bacon and the Tres
Epistolae Attributed to Him,” in Michel Terrasse, Chantal Connochie-Bourgne and Danielle Jacquart, eds., Com-
prendre et Maîtriser la Nature au Moyen Age (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 461–79. For more recent work on Bacon’s
alchemy, see Zachary Matus, “Resurrected Bodies and Roger Bacon’s Elixir,” Ambix 60 (2013): 323–40.
 338 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

metallorum non posse transmutari” found in the De congelatione. The Breve

breviarium argues at length from philosophical principles against the interpretation
of Raymundus, but these need not concern us here.32 What concerns us at present is
pseudo-Roger’s use of the mercury–sulphur theory presented by Albertus Magnus in
his Liber mineralium.
In the service of hoisting his opponent by his own petard, pseudo-Roger begins his
discussion of sulphur and mercury by paraphrasing the comments that we quoted
earlier from Avicenna’s De congelatione. Mercury, for example, is composed of
water and earth, and the various metals differ from one another by the differing
purity and digestion of the two principles within the earth. But pseudo-Roger
quickly passes from these supposedly Aristotelian ideas to those of Albert the
Great, whom he does not mention by name. In a chapter labelled “De triplici humi-
ditate sulphuris” in the 1603 printing of the Breve breviarium, pseudo-Roger has the
following comments about the three humidities (I omit the long passages where he
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discusses their differences in each metal):

Quicksilver is composed of a watery and earthy substance and it has a sulphur inter-
mixed, as appears from the fact that it burns all metals if they are cooked with it for a
while; and it breaks them and pulverizes them as soon as it is mixed with them.
Hence it is necessary to free it from sulphureity and superfluous humidity; thus it will
remain dry, clean, pure, and bright, lucid in the manner of a crystal. Sulphur also has
three humidities, one of which is airy and unctuous, and consumes, burns, blackens,
and breaks all metals … But the second humidity of sulphur is phlegmatic and neither
burning, nor blackening, but evaporating in the fire … The third humidity of sulphur
is radical and natural, through which the substantial parts of it are conjoined, and
this is the water of the sulphur that binds its earth and through which the pure substance
of sulphur is joined together and has its existence [constat & conjungitur].33

The Breve breviarium begins this passage with a recapitulation of the Avicennian
theory that quicksilver contains a subtle, sulphurous earth mixed together with a
watery material. The same claim is found in Albert’s Liber mineralium, so it is no
surprise that pseudo-Roger then passes directly into an exposition of Albert’s
theory that sulphur is composed of three humidities. If there is any doubt that the
Breve breviarium is deriving this theory from Albert, it should quickly be dispelled
by the close terminological relation between the two authors and the ordering of the
three humidities. Both pseudo-Roger and Albert call the first humidity “unctuous”
(unctuousa or unctuosum) and say that it “burns” (cremat); both authors speak of
the second humidity as “phlegmatic” (phlegmatica or phlegmaticus) and evapora-
tive (evaporans or evanida), and most telling of all, both authors use the term
“radical” (radicalis) for the third type of humidity. But the two authors differ in
one crucial respect—Albert’s Liber mineralium is a descriptive study of geological
32
I have described these arguments in William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect
Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 67–68.
33
[Pseudo-] Roger Bacon, Breve breviarium, in Sanioris medicinae magistri D. Rogeri Baconis (Frankfurt: Joannes
Theobaldus Schönvvetterus, 1603), 109–13.
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 339

and mineralogical phenomena whereas the Breve breviarium is a chrysopoetic

manual: hence pseudo-Roger tries to put Albert’s theories to work in the service
of the aurific art.
The chrysopoetic intent of the Breve breviarium is already apparent in the fore-
going passage, where the author states that quicksilver must be cleansed of its
innate sulphureity and superfluous humidity so that it will be “dry, clean, pure,
and bright, lucid in the manner of a crystal.” This advice is advanced much
further in the second part of the Breve breviarium, namely in the practica that
follows the preliminary theoretical section (the theorica). Among various methods
for congealing mercury one finds directions for “purging its earthy substance of
gross, sulphurous terrestreity and its aqueous substance from the superfluous
double humidity.”34 Only after this refining of the mercury’s earthiness and humid-
ity can it be joined with sulphur to make an elixir for the metals. This purgation of
quicksilver must be carried out by the alchemist in the same way that nature does it
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underground when making metals. The alchemist must digest and sublime mercury
in his laboratory vessels, which are artificial counterparts of the “natural vessels”
that nature employs, namely the subterranean passages and pores through which
quicksilver is driven beneath the earth in a long process of evaporation and conden-
sation.35 But the alchemist speeds up the action of nature by subliming his mercury
with “dregs,” in this case a mixture of common salt, black or green atrament, and
sulphur. If the ‘sulphur’ here is of a “prepared” type described earlier in the text, it
would probably contain little or none of our modern elemental sulphur: hence the
product of pseudo-Roger’s sublimation—a dry material “very white and lucid”
(albissimus fiat atque lucidissimus)—would probably consist of corrosive sublimate.
Before concluding with the Breve breviarium, we must also briefly consider the
author’s preparation of sulphur, which precedes the treatment of mercury just
described. Before delivering his process, pseudo-Roger repeats that sulphur consists
of three humidities, of which two are superfluous and only the third “necessary.”36
Thus, the operations that he proceeds to describe will purge the sulphur of the first
two humidities. First, the sulphur must be ground with hot salt until the two
materials become a black mass. This mass should then be boiled in a lye or some
other very sharp liquor such as urine, vinegar, lemon juice, or goat serum until
“the salt is extracted with its unctuosity” (donec totum sal extrahatur cum sua
unctuositate). After this process is repeated several times, the sulphur is sublimed
with calcined alum, scoria of iron, and vinegar. This sublimation must be repeated
seven times, until the sulphur is very white and crystalline. But the alchemist is
still not done—the purged sulphur must now be digested and fixed, just as nature

34
[Pseudo-] Roger Bacon, Breve breviarium, 190–98. See page 190 for the quoted passage—“Substantia autem sua
terrea purganda est a grossa terrestreitate sulphurea. Aquea vero substantia ab humiditate duplici superflua.”
35
For the terms “vas artificiale” and “vas naturale,” see [pseudo-] Roger Bacon, Breve breviarium, 191. These terms
also betray the influence of Albert the Great, who argues that “skillful alchemists” imitate nature when making their
vessels. See Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus, 184–85.
36
[Pseudo-] Roger Bacon, Breve breviarium, 165.
 340 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

digests and fixes the principle beneath the earth. This is done by now grinding the
sulphur with sal ammoniac and distilled vinegar, dissolving the mixture in the
heat of horse dung, evaporating the excess moisture, and congealing the prepared
sulphur. At this point, the sulphur will have been freed of its combustibility and vola-
tility, so that it can now be used to correct defective metals.
I will not follow pseudo-Roger into the complicated techniques that he now
employs in order to accomplish his chrysopoetic goals with prepared mercury and
sulphur. It is enough to see how he has put the Albertine theory of three humidities
to work in his alchemical practice by employing technologies to free the two prin-
ciples of their extrinsic humidities. There can be no doubt that pseudo-Roger sees
these humidities as material components intermixed with the “radical,” “necessary”
material of the sulphur and mercury. There is no essential difference in his mind
between these refining processes and subsequent ones found in the Breve breviarium
for purifying a host of other materials, including the metals themselves, as well as sal
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ammoniac, sal alkali, saltpetre (sal petrae), soda (sal nitri), common salt (sal commu-
nis), rocksalt (sal gemmae), green and black atrament, various alums (e.g. glaciale
and plumosum), boraxes, and so forth. To give but one example of these purifying
processes, let us briefly consider pseudo-Roger’s treatment of silver:

Silver [Luna] is prepared thus. First let it be purged by cupellation with lead [purgetur
cum plumbo & cinere]. Once fused it should be cast onto little branches and ignited
until red hot ten times, and each time it should be extinguished in pig’s blood. After
each time let it be rent into thin pieces [lanietur tenuiter] and fused with a little borax
covering the sheets and then let it be cast again on the little branches and extinguished
ten times as before … Then you should know for certain that you have very lovely
[dulcissimam], purged silver.37

The first part of this refining process is strightforward: pseudo-Roger advises that
the impure silver be cupelled with lead, as any medieval metallurgist would do. But
he is not satisfied with this. The molten silver then must be heated red hot and
thrown onto branches, then extinguished in pig’s blood. Presumably, the use of
these organic materials would result in the further reduction of silver from its com-
pounds. The process may be an adaptation from the technique of ‘poling,’ during
which saplings were thrust into molten copper as part of its refining from ore.
Albert refers rather vaguely to the operation of poling in his Liber mineralium,
though it seems likely that pseudo-Roger is following other sources here as well.38
The technology need not detain us further, however. The lesson to learn here is
that silver, and indeed the other metals as well, must be purged and refined of
their impurities before they can enter into a process of transmutation, just as
mercury and sulphur must also undergo their refining.
37
[Pseudo-] Roger Bacon, Breve breviarium, 181–82.
38
Wyckoff, Albertus Magnus: Book of Minerals, 199; Wyckoff describes the process on 222.
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 341

Conclusion
We have now surveyed a variety of Arabo-Latin and original Latin works composed
before the Geberian Summa perfectionis and the Lullian Testmentum would exercise
their huge and lasting influence on Latin and vernacular Western alchemy. As we
have seen, in this formative period the principles of sulphur and mercury were
widely considered to be material components of metals that could be treated by
analytical methods: the imputation that they were somehow inaccessible to physical
manipulation, at least in the High Middle Ages, has proven hollow. If we were to
continue this paper to include the Latin Geber, moreover, we would see much the
same development of Albertine ideas and practices that we have encountered in
the Breve breviarium, for the Universal Doctor exercised a similar influence on
the Summa perfectionis. The principles were neither ‘metaphysical’ nor ‘spiritual’
if by those terms one means ‘immaterial.’ If, on the other hand, one means such
terms to suggest that ordinary quicksilver and sulphur were believed to contain a
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pure portion disguised beneath various adulterations, that view would be closer
to the mark. But given that quicksilver and sulphur were subject to refining just
like other minerals and ores, it would seem at best gratuitous to use ‘metaphysical’
or other terms that imply the inability of the principles to be isolated or observed,
even if some historians have taken precisely that approach.
We have seen, then, that the once commonplace belief among historians of chem-
istry that alchemists universally viewed their mercury and sulphur to be metaphys-
ical, spiritual, or ideal is severely challenged by the alchemy of the High
Middle Ages. At best, this historiographical fallacy falls victim to the error of synec-
doche—confusing the part (certain chymical traditions directly before the eighteenth
century) for the whole (the sulphur-mercury theory over the longue durée). But
someone could object that I have committed the mirror-image of this mistake by
juxtaposing medieval alchemy to scholarship that was really only meant to illumi-
nate the early modern period. What relation do the alchemy of the High Middle
Ages and chymistry in the century before Lavoisier really have towards one
another? In fact, the lines of affiliation between the Geberian tradition of alchemy
and the work of early modern chymists such as Andreas Libavius, Daniel Sennert,
and Robert Boyle have been exposed elsewhere: in a word, these authors were all
deeply cognizant of the literature of medieval alchemy, as were most of the chymists
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.39 But how did the ‘chymical atomism’ of
these authors relate to the works described in the present article?
The most basic feature of chymical atomism lay in the empirical realization that
the materials operated upon in the laboratory could and often did retain their iden-
tity even after having lost their previously sensible characteristics.40 By the same

39
William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
40
For the term “chymical atomism,” see William R. Newman, “The Significance of ‘Chymical Atomism,’” Early
Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 248–64. There were other significant features of chymical atomism of course,
 342 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

token, seemingly homogeneous materials such as metals, blood, and wine could
consist of invisibly small particles of different types whose heterogeneity normally
eluded the senses and could only be revealed by analysis. This position, which
seems so natural and obvious to the modern mind, ran directly contrary to the the-
ories of mixture upheld by Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and their many followers
in the medieval and early modern universities. Building primarily on Aristotle’s De
generatione et corruptione, but also employing his Metaphysics and Physics, the
Thomists and Scotists typically claimed that the ingredients going into a perfect
mixture lost their identity in the process of being mixed.41 Hence, the persistence
of metallic ingredients such as sulphur and mercury in a fully formed metal, not
to mention the four elements out of which the sulphur and mercury were supposed
to be made, would have violated the notion that the metals were ‘perfect mixts.’ As a
result there was often an underlying, and sometimes explicit tension between Latin
alchemists and the mixture theorists of the Thomist and Scotist persuasions. This is
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not to say that the main traditions of medieval alchemy were anti-Aristotelian in any
sense; as I have argued elsewhere, numerous Latin alchemists with scholastic train-
ing built on Book IV of Aristotle’s Meteorology to develop a corpuscular matter
theory that allowed for the persistence of robust sulphurous and mercurial particles
within the fully formed metals.42
In the course of the Middle Ages, alchemists built on their understanding of the
persistence of ingredients during laboratory analysis and synthesis in a way that
led, eventually, to demonstrative proofs of atomism, as in the ‘reductions to the
pristine state’ (usually analysis after synthesis) popularized by the seventeenth-
century Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert. The robust persistence of quicksilver
within compounds such as cinnabar, corrosive sublimate, and red precipitate led
Sennert to stress that it could always be reduced to its metallic character despite
being polytropos and polymorphos.43 The same phenomenon led Robert Boyle
to speak of mercury compounds as “wearing disguises” or “masks”— the ordin-
ary laboratory processes known to ‘vulgar,’ unskilled chymists did not alter the
fundamental nature of the metal hidden behind its new illusory appearance.44

40
Continued
such as the alchemists’ frequent emphasis on laboratory analysis as a means of arriving at the constituents of mixed
bodies and the nascent acceptance of the “negative-empirical” principle, for which see the article cited.
41
For the diverse spectrum of medieval mixture theories, see Anneliese Maier, An Der Grenze Von Scholastik Und Nat-
urwissenschaft (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1952, 2. Auflage).
42
The development and influence of this theory is the subject of Newman, Atoms and Alchemy.
43
Daniel Sennert, De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu (Wittenberg: Schürer, 1629),
418–19.
44
Robert Boyle, “Essay of the Holy Scriptures,” in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward
B. Davis (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999–2000), vol. 13, 205: “But all this is Nothing to the numerous Disguizes
that Proteus, Mercury will suffer himselfe to be mask’d in, without devesting his Nature. For tho Chymists have
found wayes to disguise Quicksilver into almost as many formes as the Peripatetickes have ascrib’d to their
Materia Prima, & seeme to have soe perfectly chang’d it into Oyles, Salts, Fumes, Butters, Plasters, Powders, &
what not that they oftentimes believe themselves, when they boast those Appearing for Radicall Transformations;
yet doth that Inscrutable Prodigie of Nature, (what ever Chymists are pleas’d to thinke to the Contrary) still
remayne Reall & untransmuted Mercury; & but too often manifests himselfe to be so, to their Cost who fondly
thinke, that for having forc’d him from his outward Scheme, they have robb’d him of his almost inaccessible Nature.”
 MERCURY AND SULPHUR AMONG THE HIGH MEDIEVAL ALCHEMISTS 343

At first it might seem counterintuitive that believers in chrysopoiea like Sennert

and Boyle would argue for the stubborn persistence of mercury and other ingre-
dients within compounds. Yet as we have seen, central traditions within
alchemy had long been doing precisely that.45 Centuries before the early
modern language of masked and disguised chemical agents, the Arabic and
Latin alchemists surveyed in this article, and even the anti-alchemical critic Avi-
cenna, were arguing that the metals themselves were compounds of sulphur and
mercury, and that the sulphur and mercury within the metals were in turn com-
pounds of a humidity and a subtle earth.46 When it came to transmuting
metals, an obvious approach therefore lay in operations that improved the met-
allic principles by removing or replacing their defective ingredients.47 It was
only natural, then, for alchemists to think of the different metals as retaining
their sulphur and mercury within themselves in actu—as robust ingredients that
could be extracted, added, or purified ad libitum if one only had the proper set
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of hands-on skills and materials. It is this belief that underlies many of the
myriad practices of such texts as the De aluminibus et salibus of pseudo-Rāzı̄,
and the immense popularity of the Rāzı̄an tradition in medieval alchemy
ensured that these operations and their associated justifications would eventually
feed into other genres as well, such as the early modern books of secrets and the
Bergbüchlein tradition.48 To make matters short, Islamic alchemy and its medieval
European descendant typically framed mercury and sulphur as robust, operational
constituents of metals that were subject to physical manipulation. The passage
from this to the self-styled atomism of Sennert and the early Boyle was in some
measure a case of explicitly expressing what had long been held as a matter of
tacit knowledge by practising alchemists.49

45
It is an irony of history that among the very mercury compounds derided by Boyle one would probably find corrosive
sublimate, which the medieval alchemists examined in this article viewed as a purer form of the material than running
quicksilver. This of course represents the natural progress by which chemical products considered great magisteries
and secrets in the thirteenth century and before came eventually to be viewed as “vulgar” and commonplace. Despite
their differing views of mercury compounds, however, Boyle and the alchemists examined here agreed on one funda-
mental point—that the mercury had not been transmuted: it had either been purified of undesirable components (in
High Medieval alchemy) or it had been compounded (Boyle).
46
I do not mean simply modern chemical compounds here, of course. As we have seen, it was typical of the alchemists
surveyed in this article to view even materials that we now consider elemental, such as the metals, to be compounds.
One should note that the Latin noun for “compound” (compositio) implied a juxtaposition of substances in actu, not
a purely homogeneous mixture. For discussion of this, see Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 27–44.
47
In addition to the sources surveyed in this article, excellent examples of such techniques for removing or adding
mercury and sulphur can be found in Book 3 of the Summa perfectionis of Geber, the classic work of transmutational
alchemy in the High Middle Ages. See Newman, “Summa perfectionis” of pseudo-Geber, 740–49.
48
For an overview of these genres, see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval
and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). See also the still useful Ernst Darmstaedter,
“Berg-, Probir- und Kunstbüchlein,” Münchener Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur der Naturwissenschaften und
Medizin 2/3 (1926): 101–206.
49
One should add that the atomistic demonstrations of Sennert, Boyle, and their chymical peers received a major boost
from their use of the mineral acids, which were of course largely or wholly unavailable in the thirteenth century.
 344 WILLIAM R. NEWMAN

Acknowledgements
I thank Sébastien Moureau and the other anonymous referee of this article for their
helpful comments and suggestions throughout.

Notes on contributor
William R. Newman is a professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of
Science at Indiana University. He has published numerous books in the history of
alchemy, including Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect
Nature (2004) and Atoms and Alchemy (2006). Newman is also General Editor
of The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (www.chymistry.org), a project that is currently
editing Newton’s chymical writings online. Address: Goodbody Hall 130, 1011 E.
Third St., Bloomington, IN 47401, USA. Email: wnewman@indiana.edu.
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