Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire (review)

“The spirit becomes wise by sitting in judgement, not by wandering” (147). So declared Andreas Libavius (ca. 1550–1616) in 1615 in one of his many spirited conflicts with chymical adversaries. Libavius, schoolmaster of the Gymnasium Academicum Casimirianum from 1606 to 1616, meant by this that students must learn to discern and judge through an education based on the collected experience and orderly transmission of knowledge in the works of the ancients, primarily Aristotle, but also the alchemists of the Islamic world and the Latin Middle Ages. Through the exercise of logic, and through weighing and judging words and things, these students would both learn the importance of theory and practice and at the same time imbibe the moral character needed to become responsible citizens of towns like Coburg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in which Libavius spent most of his life. They should not be led astray by the likes of Paracelsus, who famously counseled his followers in 1538 that it was “praiseworthy and no shame to have . . . journeyed cheaply. For this I would prove through nature: he who would explore her, must tread her books with his feet. Scripture is explored through its letters; but nature from land to land. One land, one page. Such is the Codex Naturae; thus must her leaves be turned.” In Libavius’s view, such views incited schoolboys and scholars to all kinds of horrors: novelties, scorn of the ancients, autodidacticism, Ramist shortcuts to true knowledge, revelation in place of reason, self-aggrandizement, obscurantism and secrecy in language, believing that noble patronage conferred epistemic authority, new religion, even nihilistic scepticism.

Libavius is well known to historians of chemistry, primarily through the work of Owen Hannaway, who portrayed the pious schoolmaster as earnestly attempting to wrest the domain of chemistry from wild-eyed and epistemologically dangerous Hermetists and Paracelsians, and, in the process, transformed chemistry into a teachable discipline. Bruce Moran, thoroughly steeped in the rebarbative intellectual culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany through his previous work on the court of Moritz of Hessen and the first professor of chymistry, Johannes Hartmann, brings to light, not so much another side to Libavius, but much more evidence of Libavius’s valiant attempt. Many interesting points emerge from Moran’s account: just how prolific that valor was — Libavius was able to respond to critics in a matter of months in tomes usually weighing in at not less than 900 pages; the remarkable polemic and scurrility of the scholarly world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; and the trouble Libavius had in making clear to friends and enemies alike just where he stood on alchemy. Libavius exerted his utmost to articulate his position as someone who advocated alchemy and hands-on experience (although not much of a practitioner himself) and believed in the possibility of transmutation, but who also valued the traditional textual episteme in the form it had come to assume in Europe by the sixteenth century. Libavius believed it was possible to reconcile Aristotle and alchemy, and even to accept some Paracelsian recipes, a position that occasioned endless confusion, causing Parisian Galenists and Paracelsian alchemists to claim him as their own. Once made public, however, their confusion could not endure long, for Libavius rebutted their embrace at great length and in no uncertain terms. Polemic must have been part and parcel of the agonistic school culture of training in logic and formal disputation, and it must have functioned as a way to work through one’s own intellectual position, but often, as one of Libavius’s victims complained, it appeared simply an “opportunity to attack my name, to grab it with his . . . teeth . . . and to trample it underfoot as much as he could” (235). In any case, by resuscitating these controversies, Moran certainly provides a more richly textured picture of this time, revealing empiricists who...