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    Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
    Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
    Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
    Ebook262 pages6 hours

    Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire

    By Tara Nummedal

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe’s social and economic ills.

    Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, Tara Nummedal shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2008
    ISBN9780226608570
    Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
    Author

    Tara Nummedal

    Tara Nummedal is John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History at Brown University and author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      There are two things in particular that I like about this monograph. One is that Nummedal puts some meat on the bones of just how "entrepreneurial" alchemists went about their business. Two, she explains the economic imperative that made these individuals interesting to the princes of Central Europe, as their own silver mines were playing out just as the tsunami of silver from the New World was entering the European economy. Apart from that, Nummedal examines the dichotomy that the figure of the alchemist provoked, that if there were alchemists that were frauds, didn't it mean that there could be alchemists who could deliver what they claimed to be capable of?

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