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  • Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire
  • Dane T. Daniel
Bruce T. Moran. Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire. Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications/USA, 2007. viii + 344 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-0-88135-395-2).

The realm of early modern alchemy and chemistry (or chymistry) has probably been as thorny and arduous for historians as it was for its own practitioners. The subject regards both the practical and philosophical, and sundry voices engaged the murky domain, from Pico della Mirandola to Robert Boyle and from Paracelsus to Isaac Newton. We can thus be grateful for Bruce T. Moran’s illuminating study, Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy. Moran shows that Libavius (c. 1550–1616), the German schoolteacher and physician, merged the Latinate alchemical tradition with the sound reasoning of Aristotelianism. He sought to make chymistry a credible and independent university discipline by removing its magical and esoteric components and refining its bewildering vocabulary, tainted by quacks and Paracelsians. Moran masterfully captures the story by scrutinizing numerous discourses of chymia, as Libavius called the chemical enterprise. Unlike many other analyses of Libavius, the study does not rely merely on Libavius’s famous Alchemia (1597) but, rather, focuses on his letters, polemical treatises, medical and chemical commentaries, a 1606 amended version of Alchemia, and copious diatribes by his antagonists. [End Page 603]

The reader learns that Libavius hated chymists even as he sought a holy version of the art that involved assaying, making chemical medicines, the analysis and purification of metals, the understanding of the composition and properties of bodies, and “transmutations between non-noble and noble metals” (p. 71). Yet, he is important in the history of science and medicine not for contributing innovative concepts or laboratory discoveries but for his significant role in creating “an intellectual, social, and cultural domain that admitted alchemy as a didactic subject and whose language guided further chemical discussion” (p. 3). Libavius, more than anyone, brought about the general awareness that there existed the possibility of and necessity for the emergence of chemistry as an independent subject. This required sorting through the ideas and praxes of wine artisans, distillers, apothecaries, goldsmiths, and those involved in medicine, alchemy, magic, and philosophy. Indeed, in the creation of his textbook, Alchemia, which became a standard resource of chymistry, Libavius drew selectively from numerous “commendable” alchemists, including such medievals as pseudo-Lull and George Ripley, and such early moderns as Conrad Gesner and—when being cautious with the vocabulary—Gerhard Dorn and Leonhard Thurneisser.

Moran interweaves a variety of illustrative biographical stories, including Libavius’s punishments for students with poor speech, which he believed led to poor character, and the conflict between Libavius and the Jesuit Jacob Gretser. Gretser aligned alchemy with “false theology” in his attack on the Lutheran Libavius, whom he termed a double murderer in that he killed body with his “alchemistic soup” and soul with his religion (p. 114). Another episode regards Johannes Hartmann, whom Libavius initially thought was his friend. While awaiting requested help from Hartmann with chemical preparations, however, Libavius fell on a letter from Hartmann to Martin Ruland that ridiculed Libavius treacherously and revealed that Hartmann—who played an important role at the University or Marburg—had Paracelsian rather than Aristotelian leanings. The Paracelsians evoked Libavius’s ire because their medicine involved magic, sidereal influences, and the analogy between macrocosm (the greater world) and microcosm (the human). Libavius also chastised both their secrecy and belief that the processes of separation provided the basis of universal knowledge, including the Genesis creation story. Regarding religion, especially disconcerting was Paracelsus’s belief that personal inspiration and not organized religious authority was the source of religious thought. Libavius had no patience for the poor and even diabolical alchemists who had thrown out the past, despised school learning, abused Scripture, and utilized magic through signs, characters, and words—he wished to steal alchemy away from them. Moran launches a similar protest in his conclusion: “Have Paracelsus and those described as Paracelsians been complimented perhaps too much as representatives of artisanal experience and bearers of new learning in the...

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