The Place of MS Sloane 3703 Among Early-Modern English Translations of the French Paraphrase of Splendor Solis

The purpose of this note is to identify MS Sloane 3703 in the British Library in London—currently catalogued as an anonymous alchemical treatise—as yet another (though incomplete) early seventeenth-century English translation of La Toyson d’or ou Fleur des trésors, translated by an ‘L.I.’ and published in Paris by Charles Sevestre in 1612, and to place it amongst other known early-modern English translations of the same work.¹

La Toyson d’or is based on Splendor solis, an alchemical text attributed to Salomon Trismosin,² first published in the third volume of Aureum vellus in 1599,³ but extant in many illuminated manuscripts dating from c. 1530.⁴ Splendor solis is best known for its ravishing images describing various stages of the alchemical process conveying arcane knowledge of the old philosophers. The most famous manuscript is BL MS Harley 3469 (dated 1582), a very well-preserved copy, with text and twenty-two coloured illustrations which were reproduced in the 1920 English edition prepared by ‘J.K.’ (most probably Julius Kohn).⁵ The French 1612 edition was illustrated with woodblock images which were printed separately and later pasted into the book (often in the wrong order),⁶ but none of these images was copied in any of the early-modern English manuscript translations of the text.

One of the reasons for this could be that, perhaps, the authors of translations did not trust their artistic skills, or that they were not interested in the visual representation of the alchemical process. It seems that the translations were treated as a very private act of a linguistic exercise, serving the authors in deepening their knowledge. On the other hand, manuscript translations were still being produced (and copied) long after the German printed edition of the text had appeared, which might suggest that they were aimed at popularizing the treatise, at least among friends or interested amateurs.

In a chapter devoted to Splendor solis, Anne-Françoise Cannella lists the earliest editions of the text and its later versions (including La Toyson d’or).⁷ Cannella specifies six manuscripts: an English translation of the French text which is BL MS Sloane 3613 (which she believes was produced in the first half of the seventeenth century),⁸ two texts in French from the first half of the eighteenth century (Yale University Library, MS Mellon 86, and BnF MS fr. 12.297), and three Dutch manuscript copies in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam (MSS 5, 31 and 304). Cannella concludes that there might be more manuscripts and printed books ‘that once could be discovered’.⁹ To the copies identified by Cannella, we can add an English translation of La Toyson d’or from the Ashmole collection at the Bodleian Library (MS Ashmole 1395, thoroughly described in W. H. Black’s 1845 catalogue),¹⁰ allegedly done by William Backhouse, Elias Ashmole’s mentor and ‘spiritual father’,¹¹ and now also MS Sloane 3703.

The identification of the text was made difficult by the fact that the manuscript contains no references to the title or the author of the original work. Moreover, it lacks the Prologue found in the French original. The text is an accurate translation, bound as a separate volume comprising 33 folios which seem to bear the original pagination. Sloane 3703 begins with the heading ‘The first Treatise’ and the words ‘This stone of Wise men drawes the pure Elements of his Essence by the assured way of universall and fundamentall nature’.¹² Little is known about the provenance of this copy or how it entered the collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). Current catalogues do not provide the information.¹³

We do know, however, that Sloane owned the French printed edition of the text—a copy of 1612¹⁴ is catalogued with the following note: ‘Ownership: Copy at 1035.b.7.(1.). From the library of Sir Hans Sloane, with his library number on an additional engraved title page.’ The currently identified English translation in manuscript at the...