Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus (review)

In the decades and centuries after its formation in 1209, the Franciscan Order acquired a certain reputation for alchemical pursuits. These co-existed uneasily with various statutes of the Friars Minor (101), as well as papal bulls (55–6), that all rendered the legitimacy of alchemy doubtful, whether by associating it with sorcery or counterfeiting. Throughout his compact book on Franciscans and the Elixir of Life, Zachary A. Matus sets out to explore this tension during the late thirteenth century and much of the fourteenth.

The first chapter sets the stage by tracing Franciscan attitudes towards nature as God’s creation back to the order’s founder, Francis of Assisi, and his successors. Matus argues convincingly that alchemy, even if its status was more precarious than that of other fields of knowledge, ties in with the broader tendency of engagement with creation that was such a prominent feature of early Franciscanism. Throughout the three remaining chapters, The author’s three protagonists are Roger Bacon, Vitalis of Furno, and John of Rupescissa, among whom Vitalis rightly receives less attention. Matus describes how they engaged with alchemy and how this related to their biographies, shaped by the intellectual, liturgical, and ritual life of the Franciscan Order. As the strongest portion of the book, the second and third chapters explore three unique conceptions of the elixir of life developed by the book’s protagonists and how these related to apocalypticism (much indebted to Joachim of Fiore), respectively. The fourth chapter presents alchemy, especially as practised by Bacon and Rupescissa, as a “subjunctive science,” that is, one that engages with the world as it should be rather than how it really is. According to Matus, the same frame of mind characterizes rituals generally and those practised by Franciscans specifically. While science (up until the present day, one might add) definitely has episodes that could be construed as describing the world as it should be, historians of science might well adopt a more cautious stance than Matus does when he pronounces on the limits of what would have been possible in the medieval cosmos as his protagonists envisioned and experienced it (100, 117–8, 137–8).

In general, Matus chose an apt title for his study. His book is not a comprehensive account of all early Franciscans who really or purportedly engaged with alchemy, nor does it claim to be. Such a synthesis remains a desideratum. It would also have to deal more explicitly with actual laboratory (rather than ritual) practice, transmutational (in addition to medical) alchemy, and include a number of figures whose alchemical interests or biographies remain disputed or largely obscure (e.g., Elias of Cortona and Paul of Taranto, whom Matus only mentions in passing on 26 and 42, respectively). Instead, the book at hand focuses on protagonists for whom both engagement with alchemy is documented and sufficient biographical evidence is available. While some readers may not be entirely convinced by various of his readings and arguments, Matus has written an accessible, contextualizing study on how three individual Franciscans engaged with the elixir of life and embedded it into their apocalyptic speculations. In so doing, he has drawn widely on specialist scholarship (much of it written in Italian) and presents its findings to a wide international audience. Thus, the book offers intriguing glimpses of religion and science in the later Middle Ages and will hopefully inspire further research on the subject of alchemy among the Franciscans as well as other religious orders.