Words and Works in the History of AlchemyAuthor(s): Tara E.

Nummedal
Source: Isis , Vol. 102, No. 2 (June 2011), pp. 330-337
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science
Society

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 Words and Works in the History
of Alchemy

By Tara E. Nummedal*

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the implications of a shift in focus from ideas to practices in the
history of alchemy. On the one hand, it is argued, this new attention to practice highlights
the diversity of ways that early modern Europeans engaged alchemy, ranging from the
literary to the entrepreneurial and artisanal, as well as the broad range of social and
cultural spaces that alchemists inhabited. At the same time, however, recent work has
demonstrated what most alchemists shared—namely, a penchant for reading, writing,
making, and doing, all at the same time. Any history of early modern alchemy, therefore,
must attend to all of these practices, as well as the interplay among them. In this sense,
alchemy offers a model for thinking and writing about early modern science more
generally, particularly in light of recent work that has explored the intersection of
scholarly, artisanal, and entrepreneurial forms of knowledge in the early modern period.

T HE HISTORY OF ALCHEMY is flourishing. Several major international conferences

in the past five years attest to the richness of the subject, in terms of both the number
of scholars now working in the field and the range of approaches they are taking. While
a core group of scholars is exploring topics of long-standing importance, such as the
relationship between alchemy (or, as many prefer, “chymistry”) and matter theory,
medicine, or mechanical philosophy, others have drawn on the tools of art history,
religious history, and even archaeology to take the history of alchemy in new directions,
linking it to the history of the body and economic history, as well as the history of art,
literature, and material culture. In short, scholars of alchemy are now engaging a broad
and interdisciplinary array of topics that touch not only on the history of science but also
on art, literature, and European social and cultural history more broadly.1
This range of approaches is appropriate for a topic as wide ranging as alchemy, and it

* Department of History, Box N, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912.

I am grateful to Margaret Garber for her helpful comments on a draft of this essay.
1 For a sampling of current work in the field see two recent collections published in the same year: Stanton

J. Linden, ed., Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (AMS Studies in the
Renaissance) (New York: AMS Press, 2007); and Lawrence M. Principe, ed., Chymists and Chymistry: Studies
in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications,
2007). On the argument for using the term “chymistry” instead of “alchemy” see William R. Newman and

Isis, 2011, 102:330 –337

©2011 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2011/10202-0008$10.00

330

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is important that scholars interested primarily in alchemy’s relationship to the history of S
science continue to engage with those approaching the topic from the perspective of the
history of philosophy, visual culture, or literature.2 Not surprisingly, however, alchemy
remains a particularly salient topic for the history of science, especially in the early
modern period.3 This is in part the case because, as we now know, some of the most
illustrious figures of the period, including Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, engaged
alchemy seriously and in ways intricately connected to their broader (and more well
known) intellectual pursuits.4 Recent work in the history of alchemy suggests far more
than this, however. As the issue of practice increasingly has come to the fore, alchemy
now appears to be a fitting emblem for studies that aim to incorporate a broad array of
practitioners and forms of natural knowledge into narratives about the emergence of the
“new science” in the early modern period. Simultaneously bookish, experiential, and
experimental, alchemy stubbornly resists any attempt to separate out the histories of
reading, writing, making, and doing. In fact, it demands that these various engagements
with nature, the relationships among them, and the people of all social strata who created
them all be kept in play in any account of its history. In this sense, alchemy offers a model
for thinking about early modern science more generally, particularly in light of recent
work that has explored the intersection of scholarly, artisanal, and entrepreneurial forms
of knowledge.
Like medicine, alchemy has always been both an intellectual and a practical pursuit. On
the one hand, it has a long textual tradition, emerging from the pens of scholars who aimed
to understand the origins and behaviors of metals and other substances. Stretching from
antiquity to the present, with a canon of medieval and early modern texts at its core, the
alchemical corpus documents this sophisticated body of theory, elaborated in classical,
Islamic, and Christian contexts. On the other hand, alchemy has equally deep roots in the
world of the artisan—that is, of the distillers, miners, goldsmiths, and apothecaries whose
knowledge of waters, metals, and minerals, as well as the equipment and processes
necessary to work with them, constituted alchemy’s practical foundation. In many ways,
the scholar and the artisan occupied different social and intellectual worlds before the
early modern period in Europe; in the work of the alchemist, however, these worlds had
always been joined. Practitioners frequently took books with them into the laboratory;
likewise, recipes, descriptions of processes, and images of distilling equipment found their

Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and
Medicine, 1998, 3:32– 65.
2 The most creative work in the field, in fact, has attended to the interdisciplinary nature of alchemy. See, e.g.,

Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2004). There is, however, still a disconnect between literary scholars, for whom hermeticism and
“occult philosophy” remain an important framework, and historians of science, many of whom have moved away
from this approach in recent years. For an example of this disconnect see the recent exchange between Brian
Vickers and William Newman: Brian Vickers, “The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy,” Annals
of Science, 2008, 65:127–156; and William R. Newman, “Brian Vickers on Alchemy and the Occult: A
Response,” Perspectives on Science, 2009, 17:482–506.
3 Unfortunately, there is still a relative paucity of work on medieval alchemy and on non-European alchemy

generally, particularly on the corpus of Arabic sources.

4 On Newton see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy; or, “The Hunting of the

Greene Lyon” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975); Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of
Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); and William R. Newman, “Newton’s
Theory of Metallic Generation in the Previously Neglected Text ‘Humores minerales continuo decidunt,’” in
Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Principe (cit. n. 1), pp. 89 –100. On Boyle see Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring
Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998).

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332 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 2 (2011)

way back into alchemical texts. Scholars now widely recognize, therefore, that any history
of alchemy must take into account both its scholarly and its artisanal foundations.5
Writing the history of alchemical practice—that is, refocusing the history of alchemy
on alchemists and their activities, rather than disembodied alchemical ideas— has emerged
as the most productive way to explore this alchemical marriage of words and works. This
approach has involved starting with some surprisingly basic questions. What kinds of
people practiced alchemy, and what sorts of projects did they actually undertake? How did
people learn how to do alchemy? In what kinds of spaces did alchemists work, and what
kind of equipment, materials, and resources did they require? In short, to echo Ann Blair,
what did it mean to “do alchemy”? Answering these questions has required uncovering
new sources, including laboratory notebooks, contracts describing alchemical work, legal
sources, and archaeological artifacts.6 Along with more traditional texts, such as alchem-
ical treatises, these newer sources have allowed scholars to produce a much fuller and
more socially and culturally situated understanding of alchemy.
What, then, did it mean to practice alchemy in early modern Europe? For most, alchemy
was at least in part a textual practice. As a repository of alchemical theory, information
about processes, and, potentially, precious secrets, the alchemical corpus offered an
important, if complicated, resource for many students of alchemy. Many late medieval and
early modern alchemists shared their contemporaries’ instinct to look to the past for
authoritative knowledge, locating the foundations of alchemy in writings attributed (if
sometimes pseudonymously) to adepts from centuries past. The study of alchemy, there-
fore, often began with the collection and scrutiny of historical texts.7 In the early modern
period, growing numbers of new texts, both in Latin and in the vernacular, began to
outnumber the historical canon. Contemporary treatises, commentaries, alchemical poetry,
and fragments of recipes promised new insights into alchemy, captivating early modern
readers and adding to the already long list of historical texts. The process of collecting,
assessing, comparing, and commenting on all of these texts engaged many an alchemist,
as it did anyone interested in nature more generally, well into the early modern period.8

5 Bruce Moran, e.g., takes this observation as a starting point in his recent survey of the history of alchemy,

Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 2005).
6 Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.

Press, 1997), p. 4. On laboratory notebooks see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried
in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002); and
Thomas Vaughan et al., Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s “Aqua Vitae, Non Vitis” (British Library Ms, Sloane
1741) (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001). On alchemical contracts, inven-
tories of laboratories, and trial records as sources for the history of alchemy see Tara E. Nummedal, Alchemy and
Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007). For the archaeological approach see
Marcos Martinón-Torres, “The Tools of the Chymist: Archaeological and Scientific Analyses of Early Modern
Laboratories,” in Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Principe (cit. n. 1), pp. 149 –164; and R. Werner Soukup,
“Crucibles, Cupels, Cucurbits: Recent Results of Research on Paracelsian Alchemy in Austria around 1600,”
ibid., pp. 165–172.
7 Indeed, modern-day alchemists continue to be surprisingly well versed in ancient, medieval, and early

modern authors and texts, evidence that they still understand alchemy’s textual tradition to be central to the art.
8 On alchemy and the history of the book see Lauren Kassell, “Reading for the Philosophers’ Stone,” in Books

and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2000), pp. 132–150; Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alche-
mist, and Physician (Oxford Historical Monographs) (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), esp. pp. 174 –189; Newman
and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire (cit. n. 6); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London
and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2007), esp. Ch. 5; Bruce T. Moran, Andreas
Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire (Sagamore
Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2007); and Anke Timmermann, “Doctor’s Order: An Early Modern

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Alchemical texts were not the most straightforward things to work with, however, as S
many would-be alchemists soon discovered. Some texts were filled with highly allegorical
language, used code names (or Decknamen) for particular substances, or employed other
techniques of concealment in order to prevent alchemical secrets from falling into the
“wrong” hands. In addition to the resulting “terminological confusion,” anyone collecting
alchemical texts would have had to cope with texts in a bewildering variety of genres and
forms: miscellanies of vernacular recipes, decontextualized excerpts of longer treatises,
series of images representing alchemical processes, alchemical poetry, fragments of
manuscripts, often anonymous, and secondhand snippets of knowledge purportedly
gleaned from mysterious adepts or other practitioners.9 What to do with all of these bits
and pieces, especially if each had the potential to yield a valuable secret, such as the true
method of preparing the philosophers’ stone or maintaining a fire at the proper temper-
ature? Some particularly scholarly readers, most notably the German schoolmaster and
chymist Andreas Libavius, the English astrologer, alchemist, and physician Simon For-
man, and the imprisoned English metallurgical entrepreneur Clement Draper, were well
versed in the practices of humanism, which armed them with the linguistic, philosophical,
and organizational techniques to forge coherence and utility out of the rich but messy
corpus of historical and contemporary alchemical texts.10 It is worth emphasizing that this
textual work was a kind of alchemical practice in its own right.11 Moreover, as readers,
compilers, and note takers grappling with a complicated textual tradition, alchemists have
an important place in the history of scholarship, reading, and the construction of partic-
ularly early modern forms of scientific knowledge.
Alchemists rarely read and wrote about alchemy without an eye to the laboratory,
workshop, or kitchen, however; they collected, collated, and organized snippets of text in
order to locate recipes and processes, test theories, and make things, particularly medi-
cines and metals. A number of recent studies, therefore, have fruitfully explored the
intersection of words and works in alchemical practice.12 One particularly rich source for
exploring this kind of back-and-forth between textual and laboratory practice comes from
the seventeenth-century American chymist George Starkey. Starkey’s laboratory note-
books make it possible to reconstruct what William Newman and Lawrence Principe have
described as his remarkably “coherent and sophisticated” methodology, “a sequence of
evaluation-interpretation-observation-conjecture-experiment-assessment.” Seamlessly in-
tegrating work with texts and work in the laboratory, Starkey read and collected infor-
mation about processes, commented on them, tried them in the laboratory, wrote up
results, and sometimes refined the process and tried it again. In working out this kind of
“rational laboratory practice,” Starkey and alchemists like him explicitly engaged an issue

Doctor’s Alchemical Notebooks,” Early Sci. Med., 2008, 13:25–52. On the history of the book and the history
of science more generally see Blair, Theater of Nature (cit. n. 6); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print
and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998); and Frasca-Spada and Jardine, eds., Books
and the Sciences in History.
9 On Decknamen see William R. Newman, “‘Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language’? Eirenaeus Philale-

thes and Carl Jung,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et de Leurs Applications, 1996, 49:159 –188. The phrase
“terminological confusion” is from Moran, Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy, p. 55.
10 Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London (cit. n. 8), esp. Ch. 8; Moran, Andreas Libavius and

the Transformation of Alchemy, esp. Ch. 4; and Harkness, Jewel House (cit. n. 8), Ch. 5.
11 Deborah Harkness also makes this observation in Jewel House, p. 209.
12 Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire (cit. n. 6); Harkness, Jewel House; and Timmermann,

“Doctor’s Order” (cit. n. 8), pp. 38 – 40.

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334 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 2 (2011)

of central importance in the seventeenth century: the problem of method, particularly of

the relationship between textual authority and observational and experimental data.13
To be sure, laboratory work was central to Starkey’s chymical practice. And yet he
always started and ended this practice with texts. For many other practitioners, whom we
might broadly call vernacular alchemists, this relationship between words and works was
inverted, with the production of things taking center stage. Vernacular alchemists typically
came to the art not from the university or the humanist’s study but from the crafts,
particularly trades that emphasized the separation and transformation of matter, such as
assaying, mining, metalworking, pigment- and dye-making, distilling, and the manufac-
ture of medicines.14 Because these trades shared numerous techniques with alchemy,
including distillation, analysis of matter, and work with fire, practitioners could (and did)
easily turn from one to the other, drawing on their expertise in related fields to facilitate
their entrée into the practice of alchemy. We should not imagine that such vernacular
alchemists pursued a purely empirical practice, entirely disengaged from theoretical texts.
Although, like all alchemists, they gleaned many of their techniques and concepts from
speaking to other practitioners, vernacular alchemists were usually literate as well.15 They
were rarely proficient in Latin, however, which meant that they were more likely to have
a recipe or contemporary vernacular text at hand than a medieval alchemical tome such as
Pseudo-Geber’s Latin Summa perfectionis. Moreover, vernacular alchemists did not tend
to write extensively about what they were doing, unless it was for a patron whose support
they were trying to attract. In short, their primary goal in most cases was not to contribute
to the articulation of alchemical theory, either in manuscript or in print, but, rather, to use
alchemy to make things, whether medicines, precious metals, or gemstones.16
This emphasis on works linked vernacular alchemy to the artisanal and commercial
culture of early modern European cities in important ways. Vernacular alchemists often
joined their fellow artisans in hoping that their expertise in working with materials would
earn them a living, for example. Although, significantly, alchemy differed from other
crafts in that it was not organized into guilds, the trade in alchemical secrets integrated
alchemy into the growing commercial culture of early modern Europe. Much to the
dismay of more scholarly alchemists, such as Michael Maier, who believed that alchemy
was sullied by its descent into the marketplace, alchemical products and processes joined
the many other bits of nature, from basilisks to American balsam or guaiacum, that
increasingly circulated in the early modern marketplace. As purveyors of practical tech-
niques, inventions, and cures, alchemists were also prized by princely patrons, who
employed them to develop territorial economies and bolster political fortunes. Many
vernacular alchemists, therefore, operated in not only an urban but also a courtly milieu,
taking up salaried posts to try out recipes in princely alchemical laboratories or signing
risky one-off contracts for particular projects in an effort to sustain alchemical livelihoods.
Vernacular alchemists’ emphasis on works linked them intellectually as well to this

13 Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, pp. 4, 111, 316; for Starkey’s integration of work with

texts and work in the laboratory see ibid., esp. Ch. 3.

14 See Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (cit. n. 6), Ch. 1.
15 For obvious reasons, the oral culture of alchemists is difficult to access via archival records, but there are

glimpses of it nevertheless. See Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, pp. 30 –31; and
Harkness, Jewel House (cit. n. 8), Ch. 5.
16 It is worth noting, however, that artisanal knowledge increasingly found its way into print from the sixteenth

century onward. See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early
Modern Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); and Smith, Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 2).

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artisanal culture, prized in cities and courts alike. Pamela Smith has recently identified an S
artisanal epistemology characterized by “a bodily form of cognition connected to a view
that matter and nature are alive and exist in synergy with the human body.” The goal of
this engagement with nature—indeed, the very proof that the practitioner had achieved
certain knowledge—was the production of things, particularly things that could imitate
nature’s own creative powers. As “one of just a few disciplines in which people worked
both with texts and with their hands,” Smith argues, alchemy was the example par
excellence of this artisanal epistemology, which ultimately was crucial to the articulation
of the “new philosophy” in the early modern period that located knowledge in doing as
much as knowing.17
Vernacular alchemical practitioners attached other meanings to their practical work as
well. For the sixteenth-century German alchemist Anna Maria Zieglerin (ca. 1545–1575),
for example, a golden oil she called the “lion’s blood” could be used to make powerful
medicaments, gemstones, and even the philosophers’ stone; however, she also linked the
very process of using the lion’s blood to make the philosophers’ stone, which involved the
death of a little bird, to Christianity by framing the bird’s sacrifice in the laboratory as a
reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Moreover, once the lion’s blood was
complete, Zieglerin believed that she was fated to use it to regenerate the world in its final
moments by populating it with pure, alchemically generated children and thereby bringing
about the End Times. Her golden oil, in other words, was not just a substance that could
produce earthly delights and attract royal patronage (although it did both of these things);
it was also a powerful spiritual instrument that she could wield to intervene in one of the
most pressing spiritual issues of the day, the coming apocalypse. Although Zieglerin’s
holy alchemy was in some ways unique, it serves as an important reminder that a single
alchemical process or substance often had multiple valences simultaneously. To decouple
the commercial, medical, or transmutational from the spiritual dimensions of her alchemy
would be to miss the fruitful interplay among all of these elements—and thus to miss the
rich meanings she and her contemporaries attributed to laboratory work.18
Alchemy’s multivalence, in fact, is precisely the point, and it emerges most clearly from
studies of alchemy that insist that a history of alchemy must focus on both ideas and
practices. First and foremost, this approach has directed our attention to the wide variety
of practitioners. By the early modern period, individuals could engage with alchemy as
scholars, artisans, pastors, patrons, clients, entrepreneurs, and urban citizens, situating
themselves in a variety of social and cultural spaces. In the absence of guilds or a licensing
system to establish norms and police the boundaries of “legitimate” practice, alchemy
remained accessible to people from nearly all social strata and who might be motivated by

17 Smith, Body of the Artisan, pp. 95–97, 142. On commerce and natural knowledge in early modern Europe

see the essays in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and
Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange:
Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2007). On
princely patronage of alchemy see Bruce T. Moran, “German Prince-Practitioners: Aspects in the Development
of Courtly Science,” Technology and Culture, 1981, 22:253–274; Moran, The Alchemical World of the German
Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart:
Steiner, 1991); Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994); Didier Kahn, “King Henry IV, Alchemy, and Paracelsianism in France
(1589 –1610),” in Chymists and Chymistry, ed. Principe (cit. n. 1), pp. 1–12; and Nummedal, Alchemy and
Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (cit. n. 6).
18 On Anna Zieglerin see Tara E. Nummedal, “Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria

Zieglerin,” Ambix, 2001, 48:56 – 68; and Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations,” in Secrets and
Knowledge in Medicine and Science, ed. Alisha Rankin and Elaine Leong (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, in press).

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any number of aspirations, including intellectual curiosity, desire for profit, social mo-
bility, and, as in Anna Zieglerin’s case, a belief that alchemy could probe the porous
boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Furthermore, this lack of regulation
ensured that alchemy was flexible enough to allow individual alchemists and their patrons
to improvise when they set up laboratories, assessed the skills of practitioners, and created
financial arrangements to put alchemical theories and recipes into practice. Perhaps
inevitably, this hodgepodge of alchemical practices produced conflict, as competitors vied
with each other for authority and profits in an ever-expanding alchemical marketplace; this
discord must be taken not as evidence of alchemy’s failure but, rather, as a sign of its
vitality and import in the early modern period, a sign that something critical was at stake
in getting alchemy right.
Attending to the varieties of practice, as well as the conflicts they produced, has enriched our
understanding of alchemy enormously. Moreover, this approach has been crucial to placing
alchemy more firmly in the social, cultural, and intellectual landscape of European history by
linking it to commerce, urban culture, Reformation anxieties about the apocalypse, and so on.
What is as striking as this diversity, however, is what most alchemical practitioners shared. We
might imagine a spectrum of practice, with the most scholarly alchemists on one end, deeply
immersed in the work of sorting out the rich and varied textual vestiges of historical and
contemporary engagements with alchemy, and those who engaged alchemy primarily with
their hands on the other end, making (or trying to make) medicines, waters, the philosophers’
stone, and other alchemical products. And yet most alchemists fell somewhere in between, in
some way combining words and works by reading, writing, and doing. Reading practices
could involve Latin treatises and elaborate note-taking techniques or simple recipes. Practi-
tioners might attempt an alchemical operation only rarely, or as a part of their paid daily work
at a princely alchemical laboratory. Finally, they might decide to write, or even to publish,
alchemical commentaries with an eye to a broad audience— or simply to write down supply
lists for their patron. And yet most alchemists read, took notes, tried out techniques, read again,
and perhaps even wrote down some reflections on what they had learned, combining theory
and practice in ways that exemplify the investigation of nature more generally in the early
modern period.
This emphasis on the integration of words and works in alchemical practice, together
with the recognition of the broad spectrum of engagements with alchemy, has resituated
alchemy historiographically. As understood through the pioneering work of Frances Yates
and her successors, alchemy once dwelled in the interdisciplinary realm of Renaissance
intellectual history, linked fruitfully to studies of hermeticism, natural magic, art, litera-
ture, and “occult philosophy.”19 Increasingly, however, the emphasis on practice has made
it clear not only that alchemy shares a great deal with the history of chemistry and
medicine, as other essays in this Focus section argue, but also that, as a contested form of
natural knowledge, it engaged individuals from different social backgrounds and brought
together the world of the scholar and the artisan; alchemy, in short, is the example par
excellence of the vibrant blend of scholarly, artisanal, and entrepreneurial engagements
with nature that characterized early modern science. As a number of recent efforts to write
artisanal or vernacular knowledge of nature back into the history of early modern science
studies have detailed, the growth of early modern empires, the expansion of print culture,
and emergence of new forms of commerce placed new value on productive knowledge of

19 For a recent discussion and, indeed, embodiment of Yates’s legacy for the history of alchemy see Stanton

Linden’s introduction to Mystical Metal of Gold (cit. n. 1).

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nature, transforming science in ways that would have lasting effects. This work has S
extended the boundaries of the history of science to include ever more kinds of people,
places, and things, introducing a richness, even chaos, that sometimes makes it difficult to
know how to weave together all of this variety into a single narrative about the rise of early
modern science. But this is perhaps the point. If we wish to understand the full variety of
engagements with nature in the early modern period, then we can find no better emblem
than alchemy, which forces us to keep in focus the productive tension between words and
works in early modern natural knowledge.

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