The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation (review)

Urszula Szulakowska established herself at the forefront of scholars dealing with early modern esotericism in 2000 when Brill published her monograph, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Symbola Et Emblemata Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Symbolism 10). The peculiarity of this heavily illustrated book was that its author revisited the principles of iconology and semiotics and offered a study of intellectual history with a methodology that threw light on little-examined visual aspects of speculative alchemy in relation to developments of early modern science, primarily optics and geometry.

In her new book, The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom, Szulakowska still complains that “recent research into the history of alchemical illustration in the Renaissance period is sparse” (p. 4). Although she could rely on some case studies by Barbara Obrist, Helena de Jong, and Hereward Tilton, she decided to carry on her own program and continue the study of alchemical illustrations in a new monograph. This time she has examined some of the same material—John Dee, Heinrich Khunrath, Robert Fludd, Jakob Böhme—although from a new angle: the relationship between alchemy and Protestant apocalyptic theology. Furthermore, the book introduces a storehouse of new and so far in English scholarship, hardly mentioned, German Protestant materials, especially Stefan Michelspacher’s cabalistic images from 1616, but one could also refer to her analyses of the works of Daniel Mylius, Michael Maier, Lambsprinck, Abraham von Franckenberg, and many anonymous alchemical works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the monograph concentrates mostly on the ideology of the German Reformation, it is noteworthy that Szulakowska also uses some important Italian and English illustrated alchemical manuscripts to corroborate her argument.

Although the title does not suggest it, this book has interest for historians of medicine. As alchemy in the Renaissance was inseparable from medicine, and as the discussed alchemists and theologians were often at the same time medical doctors, the book chapters often touch on theologically tinted medical, or medically tinted theological, ideas. This tendency has its climax in the analysis of Robert Fludd’s Anatomiae Amphitheatrum (1623) and Medicina catholica (1629–31), and one must recognize that the author here offers a deep and contextualized reading of these works that has probably never been done before.

The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters. The introduction has a literature review (referred above) and also sets out the basic argumentational logic of the book. First of all, Szulakowska claims that the emergence of Paracelsian alchemical illustration in the Protestant lands may be explained by the rejection of Catholic imagery where these illustrations could fulfill the role of spiritual substitutes, too. This assumption determines the direction of research and interpretation: “In the present study, Paracelsian alchemy as a phenomenon will be contextualized within the history of the German Reformation, specifically within the various disputes over the nature of the Eucharist and the accompanying terror of the Day of Judgement, believed to be imminent in the Last Times of the late sixteenth century” (p. 3).

Chapter 4, “The Sacrificial Body,” is perhaps the most revelatory of the book. Here the author touches on the otherwise very fashionable topic of early modern anatomies and connects the themes of anatomical knowledge and anatomical imagery to contemporary theological ideas about Christ’s sacrificial body in a completely novel way. She compares the anatomical drawings of Vesalius, Fludd, and Michelspacher to demonstrate to what extent the new anatomy could be appropriated for theological and spiritual purposes and for the ideology of the Reformation.

For historians of medicine, chapter 6—“Robert Fludd’s Sacramental Medicine”—is of utmost importance. Those who expect Fludd to be restored among medical innovators will of course be disappointed. The detailed...