Distilling Knowledge—Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution by Bruce T. Moran (review)

REVIEWS 268 and a practical manual (ars). The author observes that its inner scholasticism is dominated by a basic duality that makes this treatise very complex. It is a descriptive work, but also a prescriptive work; it is a work that uses nearly all the artifices of rhetoric, but it is structurally organized according to principles of philosophical dialectic, understood as veritable disputationes. Monson also considers the irony that seems to permeate the entire treatise. The second section , “Problems of Meaning: Andreas and The Courtly Themes,” deals with several important principles connected to the theme of love proper to scholastic tradition: vernacular poetry, feudal society, Christianity, and moral questions— such as carnal love versus spiritual love—opposing vernacular poetry to Christianity and to Ovid. Monson’s study is rich with interesting insights into De Amore; in particular it focuses its function as a compendium, offering a synthesis of conflicting traditions. This extremely original piece of scholarship is written clearly and contains a large selection of basic sources and references. ROSSELLA PESCATORI, Italian, UCLA Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge—Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2005) 189 pp. Any upper-division undergraduate or first-year graduate student who begins to tackle the history of chemistry is bound for a certain amount of befuddlement. The deep and very foreign vocabulary employed by chymists in the early modern world is an obstacle that can take weeks to unravel, even in an elementary way. What has long been needed is an introductory text which lays the groundwork for understanding the development of chemistry from its roots in the alchemist’s laboratory, and which defines the terms so often encountered in maze-like primary sources. Bruce Moran’s Distilling Knowledge fills that need. Moran’s work is foundational history. By and large, he is not presenting any new thesis or interpretation with this work, and he is not presenting the findings of any new research. Rather, the work is in many ways an elongated bibliographical essay which helps the student who is new to the subject steer through the massive literature which had appeared over the last thirty years. A satisfyingly broad (though not exhaustive) bibliography awaits the reader at the end. In spite, however, of the introductory quality of the book, Moran does make one slight adjustment to the traditional history. Rather than focus his attention on what alchemists believed (on the philosophy of alchemy, as it were), he highlights the practice of alchemy. Moran intends in this book to “consider physical processes and practical experiences themselves, the doing and making of something through personal agency, as appropriate objects of discussion.”(6) Alchemy, says Moran a bit later, was not so much something “that people believed in; it was something that they did.”(10) In focusing on the practices of the alchemists and chymists, Moran helps the novitiate historian understand why it is that one figure can spend entire books berating others for their beliefs, and yet turn around and (apparently) contradict himself by doing many of the exact same things in his own laboratory. The primary example Moran uses in the book is the German chemist Andreas Li- REVIEWS 269 bavius. Libavius excoriated Paracelsus and his followers for their superstition and credulity, while turning around and defending the idea of transmutation. Moran begins his explanation by demonstrating what exactly alchemists did. The primary task for the alchemist was to separate natural substances through various laboratory techniques, distillation being the most common. The techniques remained common to all alchemists, regardless of their backgrounds. Often, the alchemist was attempting to discover the formula for a basic element that could work any number of miracles. This element took on (depending on whose laboratory you were in) different names: the fifth essence, aqua regia, or the Philosopher’s Stone. Basic to almost all of their systems however, was the belief that this essence could be found in nature. Nature used this very essence to transform lead into gold, just as she transformed coal into diamond. The understanding that alchemy is a process of discovering processes lies at the heart of the book. Moran continues by describing how everyday artisans employed...