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Introduction The larger Atlantic world connections of colonization are now transforming Puritan studies. Colonial historians are rediscovering, although in new ways, something that Perry Miller noted more than two generations ago: New England’s Puritans were continuing participants in a complex culture whose intellectual roots extended throughout Protestant Europe. This study adds another dimension to the discussion of this complex culture by demonstrating how one leading Puritan transferred Protestant alchemical beliefs and practices from the Old World to the New and how this Christian natural philosophy helped inform colonial expansion and influenced early colonial New England’s culture. The life of John Winthrop, Jr., exemplifies the physical and intellectual links that spanned the Atlantic. Governor of Connecticut and son of the founding governor of Massachusetts, Winthrop was one of the most important men in colonial English America. Born in 1606, he was a political leader from his arrival in New England in 1631 until his death in 1676. He was also a leading undertaker of three new towns and the promoter of New England’s first ironworks. Winthrop was a cosmopolitan intellectual and world traveler who journeyed through Europe and to the Middle East searching for knowledge of scientific mysteries. He was a successful suitor for a royal charter for Connecticut in the Restoration court of Charles II and a founding member of the Royal Society. Like many natural philosophers of his age, Winthrop believed he lived in a time of special theological purpose, one in which God had elected to reveal again total knowledge of the natural and supernatural worlds. Such knowledge , once possessed by Adam, had been lost at the Fall, but it would be regained, many believed, through a process of research and discovery that would foreshadow Christ’s Second Coming. Francis Bacon’s call for an empirically based great instauration of knowledge and his utopian vision of a new Atlantis were rooted in this belief in providential intellectual renewal. So was 1. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939).  · Introduction the fervor that greeted the appearance of the Rosicrucian manifestos, tracts of a supposedly secret group of European natural philosophers dedicated to restoring the “truth, light, life and glory” of the prelapsarian world. During theyears when English Puritans were undertaking godlycolonies in the Atlantic world, scientific reformers were working to synthesize Baconian empiricism and Rosicrucian millennialism into practical reform programs to improve world conditions in preparation for Christ’s return. Winthrop was drawn to such religioscientific schemes. In his early twenties he began to study alchemy, the branch of natural philosophy many believed was the key to all understanding. Christian alchemists—those alchemists who believed God both influenced their quest for knowledge and intended their discoveries to be used to render Christian service to society—sought mastery over the natural world through the study and manipulation of the visible and occult forces permeating nature.While casual twenty-first-century observers often think of alchemy only as a vain and greedy quest to turn lead into gold, early modern practitioners thought of it as a legitimate, multidimensional science that could provide a profusion of benefits. Transmutation—turning lead into gold—was only one of alchemy’s goals, and alchemy strove as much to achieve purity out of corruption as to generate any monetary value. Equally important was the search for the alkahest, the divinely granted elixir that would cure all diseases. Although Christian alchemists believed God granted only the most spiritually worthy adepts knowledge of such secrets, they also believed that, in the effort to attain them, alchemical practitioners were often given knowledge of lesser improvements with important practical benefits. Advances in medicine, mining, metal refining, husbandry, cloth dyeing, and military defense were common by-products of the chemical quest and important signs to alchemists that God was favoring their endeavors. Moreover, such discoveries could be instrumental in helping establish individual alchemists (not to mention whole societies) on a firm economic footing. The revenues from them could in turn fund the social amelioration many envisioned as part of their godly mission. This fusion of Christian quest for hidden knowledge with the simultaneous possibility of economic gain and utilitarian benefits helps explain alchemy’s efflorescence among early-seventeenth-century European intellectuals and the profusion of programs that were advanced to perfect the world and hasten the millennium through alchemical study and its sequelae. 2. Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration [160]; and, New Atlantis [167], ed. J.Weinberger (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1986...

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