Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (review)

Alas, the dilemmas of the early modern alchemist: He had to appear both to believe that knowledge should be made public for the coming reform of the world and simultaneously to hold in store quantities of secrets. He needed to keep his recipes under wraps to protect his own livelihood, but at the same time to reveal enough to convince others that he really knew what he was about. He had to borrow from authorities to establish his own authority, but he also had to ridicule these same authors in order to display his originality. He had to establish his scholarly credentials—but these very qualifications might disqualify him as a truly skillful practitioner, while his practical skills could cause his patrons to regard him as nothing but a vulgar mechanic. How could he sell his wonder-working elixirs without being viewed as just one of a crowd of charlatans—but if he did not sell, how could he live? His plight was especially acute because so many of his rivals cheapened themselves by resorting to advertising in newfangled newspapers.

Gehennical Fire portrays one seventeenth-century alchemist’s struggle with these dilemmas, and his only partially successful solution of creating a fictional adept for whom he became the mouthpiece. In the end, this strategy landed William Starkey in debtor’s prison and earned him notoriety as only an appendage to his fictional persona—but for a while, at least, he hobnobbed with the most au courant of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, among them Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle.

William Newman not only re-creates William Starkey’s life with impressive historical detective work and contextualization, but also succeeds in his object of placing Starkey in the mainstream of the scientific revolution. Since the work of Karin Figala and Betty Jo Dobbs showed the centrality of alchemy in Newton’s thought, such an undertaking is not as surprising as it might once have been, but it still yields wonderful and hitherto-unsuspected fruits. By always visible (and sometimes relentless) argumentation, Newman convinces the reader that an “obscure” figure of the New World colonies exercised great influence on the better-known giants of seventeenth-century science. Along the way, he teaches us a great deal about the history of chemistry and alchemy. He explicates the importance of Paracelsus and Jan Baptista Van Helmont in the scientific revolution; he shows with consummate skill that one important but unknown source for the corpuscular theory of the seventeenth century lay in alchemical theory; and he makes clear that the belief in the transmutation of metals was a logical outcome of matter theory, rather than “occultism” or any of the variety of other names such a belief has been called over the years. He provides a history of alchemy that is valuable in itself, showing how the alchemy of the Arabs was transformed by European scholasticism, by the religious upheavals of the early modern period, by the messianism and vitalism of Paracelsus, by the chiliasm of the sectarians, and finally by the mixture of vitalism and corpuscularism of Van Helmont. His ability to negotiate the labyrinth of alchemical texts, language, and Decknamen, and to extract the matter theory underlying the obscure language, is nothing short of spectacular.

For several chapters, Newman immerses us in a world in which it is possible that the Emperor is paying his troops with gold produced by alchemical transmutation, and where the making of honey by bees, pigmentation with dyes, wine making, and the transmutation of base metals into gold are all related phenomena; and he shows us the reasoning behind these now-alien ideas. It is, then, with some disappointment that we find him in the final chapter seeking to establish the legitimacy of his own work by attempting to demonstrate the influence of Starkey’s fictional personage on the last giant of the scientific revolution, Isaac Newton. His claims...