Fasciculus chemicus (review)

144 Reviews the events narrated, partly Christian and partly pre-Christian. This last view is enforced by that of James W. Earl in 1982 and 1983 that the culture was distancing itself from the 'dead weight of its archaic tradition' (p. 169). Perhaps this selective report on things suggested should end where Davis began, with reference to R. M . Wilson and his finely perceptive The Lost Literature of Mediaeval England (1952). The earlier masses of legend were lost for a complex of social, moral and religious reasons. And the Norman Invasion would but complete that process of impending oblivion. Yet Davis would at the end have us consider Beowulf's o w n fate in a special way: 'to adapt Coleridge's phrase, the Beowulf-poet seems to ask his audience, at least for the duration of his poem, for a willing suspension of theological belief (p .182). J. S. Ryan School of English, Communication and Theatre University of N e w England Dee, Arthur, Fasciculus chemicus (English Renaissance Hermeticism 6) ed. Lyndy Abraham, trans. Elias Ashmole, London and N e w York, Garland, 1997; board; pp. xcii, 115; 5 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$52.00. The avowed aim of Stanton Linden's 'English Renaissance Hermeticism' ser is to publish works which are 'among the least accessible and most important for interdisciplinary research . . . [in] Renaissance literature, intellectual history, science and philosophy'. This aim is amply fulfilled in the publication of this little volume. As Lyndy Abraham points out in her erudite and scholarly introduction, while the importance of Elias Ashmole's substantial alchemical anthology, the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652) has long been recognised by historians of alchemy, this translation (Ashmole's first alchemical publication) has rarely been mentioned. First published in Latin by Arthur Dee (son of the Elizabethan mathematician and magus John Dee) in 1631, the Fasciculus earned its author a considerable reputation in central Europe. Abraham's edition has a twofold usefulness for historians of Early Modern alchemy, in that it gives us an insight into the humanist milieu of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European alchemy, but also shows us h o w this milieu was extended and transformed by the midseventeenth -century enthusiasm for universal languages, systematising methods, epitomes and the systematic collection of common-places. Thus while Dee's original preface stresses the humanist labour of having 'accurately perused the most select and approved authors' and having 'chosen, culled, compacted, and digested' the 'wholsome Flowers' of the texts into a 'Fasciculus, for the Ease and Benefit of Young Students in this Art', Ashmole's introduction represents Dee's work less as a well-organised pedagogical manual for the 'Youngling Artist' than as an exalted encyclopaedic search Reviews 145 for a clavis universalis of alchemical method. Dee is one of the 'Adepted Priests' of the art, and his work a 'branched Candlestick' of texts, not 'snatcht and stripf from individual works, but 'disposed in so advantageous a Method, that w e are much neerer to finde out the right path by the order wherein he hath ranked their sayings'. For Ashmole Dee's work constituted a 'Methodical Chain' which raised it about the 'ordinary beaten track of Discourse' to the level of a 'pure and heroick science', which systematized the 'deformed Chaos' of textual tradition into 'Chosen vessels'. Abraham's introduction not only sets the Fasciculus in the context of the alchemical tradition of compendious collections of commonplaces, but provides a wide variety of scholarly materials for alchemical researchers. The first half of her introduction comprises a substantial biographical essay, charting Arthur's career from his childhood witnessing of the practical alchemical feats of his father in Bohemia, through his troubled years as a medical practitioner in London (which repeatedly brought him into conflict with the Royal College of Physicians) before he became physician to Queen Anne, and his later successes, first as 'Archiater' (or chief physician) to Tsar Mikhail Fedorivich Romanov in Moscow, with a substantial residence at the Dinski Gate close to the Kremlin, and then (towards the end of his life) his return to England astitularphysician to Charles I. In addition to collecting together all of the extant historical...