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Renaissance Quarterly
Stanton J. Linden, ed., Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (Brooklyn: AMS Press, Inc., 2007)2008 •
In Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, Stanton J. Linden has collected together sixteen essays exploring the varied and reciprocal exchanges between alchemical thought and the wider culture of the Renaissance. He takes the fortieth anniversary, in ...
2019 •
For a long time alchemy has been considered a sort of intellectual and historiographical enigma, a locus classicus of the debates and controversies on the origin of modern chemistry. The present historiography of science has produced new approaches to the history of alchemy, and the alchemists’ roles have been clarified as regards the vicissitudes of Western and Eastern cultures. The paper aims at presenting a synthetic profile of the Western alchemy. The focus is on the question of the transmutation of metals, and the relationships among alchemists, chymists and artisans (goldsmiths, silversmiths) are stressed. One wants to emphasise the specificity of the history of alchemy, without any priority concern about the origins of chemistry.
Archaeology International
The archaeology of alchemy and chemistry in the early modern world: an afterthought2012 •
Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, VOL. 16, 2010, 166-190.
Some Modern Controversies on the Historiography of Alchemy2010 •
2011 •
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 modem period.
Three major anthologies of Latin alchemy were published between 1602 and 1702: the six-volume 'Theatrum Chemicum," the single-volume "Musaeum Hermeticum," and the two-volume "Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa," the last in large folios. Each had a clear editorial design.
British Journal for the History of Science, 47 (2): 372-374
Book Review: Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy2014 •
2016 •
Illinois Classical Studies
Alchemy in the Ancient World: From Science to Magic1990 •
2007 •
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions
Art and Alchemy: The Mystery of Transformation2015 •
Religion and Literature, 17, 1: 47-60
The Alchemy of Man and the Alchemy of God: The Alchemist as Cultural Symbol in Modern Thought1985 •