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Reviews 233 and bows in the warfare of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and Parker examines the developing importance of gunpowder in the same period. As an 'illustrated history', this book is an undoubted success. The pages are attractively designed, with good use of paintings and photographs, many in colour. Maps are somewhat fewer but judiciously used and well-presented. The technique of imparting additional information through sidebars, lengthy captions and inserted panels, while conventional enough, is well done and carefully balanced against the main text. The unified design of the volume is rounded off with a good chronology and glossary, well-chosen introductory lists of further reading, and a detailed index. There is something curious, though, in producing such an attractive book on such an unattractive subject. The very design of the book tends to convey its own underlying message that war is colourful, interesting and exciting. This is not to say that the book ignores entirely the personal experiences of individual combatants, or the suffering and destruction which are the inevitable accompaniment of war. But these play a minor role in the text, and are usually relegated to the sidebars and inserted panels. For the most part, the book addresses the audience which the publisher claims for it: 'military enthusiasts' and those interested in the historical role of warfare in theriseof the West. It fails, however, to convey the human experience of and reaction to violence on such a scale: the fear and terror, or alternatively the exhilaration and frenzy, which war inspires in combatants and civilians alike. John Keegan did this, memorably, in The Face of Battle, and there are many personal and fictional accounts of such reactions which could have been drawn on but were not. In the end, this is a book by military historians for military enthusiasts, whether armchair or professional, rather than a fully rounded account of the place of warfare in human life. Toby Burrows Scholars' Centre University of Western Australia Library Roberts, Gareth, The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994; paper; pp. 128; 77 figures, 17 colour plates; R.R.P. US$25.95. Gareth Roberts takes the title of his brief introduction to alchemy from Roger Bacon's The Mirror of Alchemy (1597) or perhaps from John Dastin's 234 Reviews 'Speculum philosophiae' (16th-17th century) and other similarly titled anonymous manuscripts. Beginning with early Greek and Arabic alchemy, Dr Roberts offers a useful history of the western European tradition. He provides potted lives of the medieval alchemists, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova and Ramon Lull, as well as of the major fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English alchemists, George Ripley, Thomas Norton and Thomas Charnock. Both the authentic and spurious works of these authorities are discussed. There is a chapter on alchemical theory and practice including an account of the convertibility of the four elements which were considered to be the basis of matter, an idea deriving from Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle. This is followed by a lucid explanation of Geber's sulphur/mercury theory of the generation of metals which dominated alchemical thought from medieval times until the early eighteenth century, despite the introduction of Paracelsus' salt/sulphur/ mercury theory, a variation on this theme. There is an interesting section on the language of alchemy with a discussion of the intenselyfigurativeand metaphoric nature of this language involving the use of enigma, riddle, symbol, paradox, analogy and allegory— verbal forms in which one thing is said when another is meant. Dr Roberts also discusses the alchemical narratives of violence, of myth and romance, as well as the Christian themes and parallels which abound in alchemical texts. He suggests that what distinguishes alchemy from its offspring chemistry, beginning to emerge as a separate science in the seventeenth century, was language and the assumptions that language embodied. It is unfortunate that he has failed to go further than this limited, and limiting, current view, put into circulation by Vickers in the early 1980s. In the development of scientific theory and practice there is a constant interaction between thinking, perception and its...

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