In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

J two J The Republic of Alchemy and the Pansophic Moment On the November 1631 day that John Winthrop, Jr., stepped ashore to the welcoming salutes of cannon fire and musket volleys from the Bay Colony’s trainbands , he began a career of colonial leadership that would see him become one of the most important figures in all English America. Twenty-five years old and the firstborn son and namesake of Massachusetts’s governor, Winthrop was destined by birth for colonial preferment and position. His affable, entrepreneurial personality, intercultural sensitivity, political savvy, and scientific knowledge helped him parlay that preferment into positions of Atlantic world eminence. Over the next half century,Winthrop would found three colonial towns, serve as a Bay Colony assistant for nearly two decades, govern the colony of Connecticut for eighteen years, secure that colony a charter from the Restoration court of Charles II granting it virtual independence, found several New England iron foundries, serve as physician to nearly half the population of Connecticut, and become a founding member of the Royal Society. Alchemical knowledge and philosophies factored, often essentially, into each of these accomplishments. To understand John Winthrop, Jr., as an English colonial leader, it is essential to understand how his thinking about alchemy developed and how he deployed alchemy as a strategy for colonial development during a particular moment in the history of both alchemy and English colonization.To understand that is to see, in turn, the development of colonial New England, and especially Connecticut, from a new and revealing perspective. Long considered, if at all, a bucolic backwater of the colony to its north, Connecticut herein takes center stage as a place upon which many early modern Europeans focused great attention and from which a conflicting set of transformations came to be expected. Throughout his years in New England, and never more than during his 1. John Winthrop, Nov. 4, 1631, in Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop, 160–16 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 60. 44 · The Republic of Alchemy and the Pansophic Moment first years as a colonist, Winthrop’s correspondence to and from Europe was punctuated with alchemical communications: orders for books and alchemical apparatus and discussions of experiments, alchemical movements and adepts, receipt of ore samples, and requests for chemicals useful in assaying metals. From first arrival Winthrop expected the broad-ranging technological aspects of alchemical natural philosophy to play a major role in establishing the Puritan project on a sound economic footing. To that end, he undertook a variety of tasks that afforded him the opportunity to explore the coastal regions and interior of New England, assaying the local physical environment for potential metal or mineral ore deposits. In addition to serving on the colony Court of Assistants, he managed the Bay Company’s fur trade business and in the spring of 1633 moved north of Boston to found the town of Agawam (now Ipswich). His requests for chemicals during this period suggest the kinds of practical ventures he envisioned. He ordered ingredients useful for soap and glassmaking, sulfur for use in gunpowder manufacture, sandiver for assaying metals, and other minerals with which to conduct alchemical experiments. He also ordered a variety of medicines while continuing his research into the panacea alkahest. Even at this early stage of his career, Winthrop probably provided medical care in the communities in which he resided, though it is unlikely that he practiced medicine to nearly the extent he was to do in later years.2 The books obtained for him by Edward Howes, with whom the alchemical partnership formed earlier at the Inner Temple continued to grow, show that Winthrop’s interests melded the occult aspects of alchemy and related occult sciences into his practical chemical pursuits. Among the texts he acquired were Petrus Galatinus’s De arcanis catholicae veritatis, a work on the mystical Cabala, a volume by the Bristol alchemist Samuel Norton on the philosopher’s stone, and two volumes of the work Utriusque cosmi mairoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia by Robert Fludd. Fludd, a Kentishborn member of the Royal College of Physicians, had published the first English defense of the Rosicrucian movement in 1616. Howes had strongly recommended Fludd to Winthrop as an alchemist whose works were “well drest for your Pallate.”3 2. Ronald Sterne Wilkinson, “John Winthrop, Jr. and the Origins of American Chemistry” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1969), 25–32; Edward Howes to...

Share