About Furnace and Fugue
Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's "Atalanta fugiens" (1618) with Scholarly Commentary brings to life in digital form an enigmatic seventeenth-century text, Michael Maier's alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens. This intriguing and complex text from 1618 reinterprets Ovid's legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Re-rendering Maier's multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced digital publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize in full before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike. Three short introductory essays invite readers to get acquainted with early modern alchemy, and Michael Maier. Eight extended interpretive essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe. These interdisciplinary essays also include interactive features that clarify and/or advance the authors' arguments while positioning Furnace and Fugue as an original, uniquely engaging contribution to our understanding of early modern culture.
In collaboration with University of Virginia Press, Project MUSE is proud to host one of these introductory essays, "Sound and Vision: The Alchemical Epistemology of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens" by Tara Nummedal, as an Open Access sample of this innovative digital publication, complete with the dynamic display and rich multimedia that make the full Furnace and Fugue publication such a valuable resource.
Readers are encouraged to explore the full book at: https://furnaceandfugue.org/
