Robert Fludd's Visual and Artisanal Episteme: A Case Study of Fludd's Interaction with His Engraver, His Printer-Publisher, and His Amanuenses.

Robert Fludd was a thinker full of contradictions. He is famous for his theosophical system and for his experimental chymical constructions as well as for his Galenic medical practices. Furthermore, Fludd had his works published in luxurious folio formats by the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry, and the spectacular etchings and many of the engravings in his books were executed by Matthäus Merian the Elder. Fludd's elaborate explanations of these images reveal him to be a natural philosopher who expressed his thoughts graphically. To what extent, however, were the ideas for the images, and the images in Fludd's books themselves, his own? A discussion of preserved textual and image sources suggests that Fludd can indeed be understood as a chymical thinker and practitioner who contributed to the visual and artisanal episteme of his time. This article demonstrates this interpretation by using both well-known sources and the recently rediscovered, lavishly illustrated, master copy, Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main, MS lat. qu. 15, which served as a template for the section De technica microcosmi historia of Fludd's main work Utriusque cosmi historia.

Making University Fields for Chymistry: A Case Study of Helmstedt University.

Current collections of the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) situated in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, contain nearly two thousand chymical books. Most of them were acquired immediately after publication, during a period extending from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The acquisition of these manuscripts and printed books by the former Wolfenbüttel court was closely connected to a university: the Wolfenbüttel Library and the erstwhile University of Helmstedt belonged to the same court of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Both institutions exchanged book holdings several times. As a result, most of the books, as well as the administration files of the university, are today located in Wolfenbüttel. Those materials provide scholars with an opportunity to study the academic demarcations between Aristotelian natural philosophy and chymistry; and to examine the relationship between court chymistry and the university. This article offers some reflections on what chymistry was like at a "normal" early modern university by delineating chymistry's position within the University of Helmstedt over the period of its existence, from 1576 to 1810.