Medical Performance and the Alchemy of Plants in the Ventures of Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn.

Among the cross currents of social and intellectual life in the early modern era, wonder, utility, and playfulness combined to inspire curiosity and to give value to novel alchemical procedures and chemical remedies. One of the most skilful alchemical and medical performers, who brought theatrical techniques to bear upon an economy of alchemical secrets and magic, was the self-trained Paracelsian physician, mining expert, and alchemical adept, Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn (1531-1596). In creatively designed and illustrated books produced for a luxury market, he constructed, in words and images, theatres of procedure, instrumentation, and chemical curiosity based in traditions of Renaissance magic and Paracelsian natural philosophy. Thurneisser's books combined strategies of spectacle and performance within the context of chemical analysis, and in one text especially brought the dramatic technique of "making strange" to bear upon promoting alchemical procedures for purposes of exposing the hidden powers within plants. In staging analytical spectacles involving measurement, instrumentation, and distillation as part of the analysis of minerals, waters, and plants, Thurneisser brought together laboratory-based procedures and theoretically grounded performances within the alchemical marketplace and engaged the agency of readers in establishing the credibility of the philosophy of nature that underscored the products he produced and sold.

Court Authority and the University: Networks, Recipes, and Things-in-the-Making vs. the Abstractions of Made Things.

Making things by means of alchemical know-how, and the habits of knowledge used to sort, classify, and explain alchemy's made things relied upon different traditions of learning and functioned as parts of separate knowledge networks, each making claims, in distinctive ways, to epistemic authority. When alchemy crossed the threshold of the early modern university, networks, and their epistemes, intertwined; and in one instance, the case of alchemical things-in-the-making at the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Kassel courts of Wilhelm IV and his son Moritz, one network affected the other as a result of a planned didactic encounter created by princely command. In the interaction, the local network of court experience at Kassel intersected with the more universal network of traditional pedagogy at the court's university in Marburg. The entanglement produced both intellectual and social disturbance as traditional ways of knowing collided with practices supported by theoretical assumptions viewed as incompatible with established didactic method and logical claims to truth.

Eloquence in the Marketplace: Erudition and Pragmatic Humanism in the Restoration of Chymia.

This chapter focuses upon the relation between textual and social practices that influenced the formation of a communal approach to acquiring chemical knowledge in the early seventeenth century. It also describes the utilitarian purpose of a humanist-inspired program of chemical learning that blended practices of textual/linguistic expertise and artisanal know-how. Humanism, made pragmatic, sought to define the principles for "making things well." In the design of Andreas Libavius (ca. 1555-1616), interpretive intuitions resulting from practiced reading of ancient and medieval texts combined with a knowledge of workshop language to build consensus about chymia's tools, procedures, and materials and to define its principia artificialia.

Alchemy and the history of science. Introduction.

Alchemy is part of the cultural experience of early modern Europe and yet has had to overcome problems of demarcation to be considered relevant to the history of science. This essay considers historiographical and methodological issues that have affected the gradual demarginalization of alchemy among attempts to explain, and find things out about, nature. As an area of historical study, alchemy relates to the history of science as part of an ensemble of practices that explored the natural world through natural philosophy and speculative traditions and by functioning as a nexus of social and intellectual life.