Entrepreneurial Alchemy

In some ways, these are not new questions. Historians have long noted the prominence of alchemy at princely courts and have offered a variety of 

Historians have tended to subsume alchemy within this more general occult philosophy, focusing on the power that alchemical ideas could offer early modern elites. Because alchemy was both a philosophy of nature and a practical technology, however, it offered more direct and concrete opportunities for control as well, especially in the economic arena.2 As this chapter argues, alchemists practical expertise in the extraction and 

Like the prince-bishop of Wurzburg, some early modern rulers expressed the hope that alchemy could fund various kinds of political projects. Without question, the territorial states of the empire faced growing costs in the sixteenth century. Many rulers simply needed an additional source of income to make up for budgetary shortfalls, and alchemy s promise of transmutation could easily seem to offer a solution. This financial crisis had deep roots since at least the fifteenth century, the princes, nobility, and clergy of the Holy Roman Empire had had difficulties generating enough revenue solely from their traditional sources of income in an 

These new technologies were also extremely expensive, however, and soon the need for capital to take advantage of them spurred innovative financial arrangements that drew in merchants and princes as investors. 

Just as the central European mines stagnated, gold and silver from Africa and the Americas began to flow into Europe. The Portuguese imported 

---

As one might expect, early modern alchemy looks quite different from this point of view. It is a central contention of this book, however, that these entrepreneurial alchemists did more than simply add to a centuries-old alchemical tradition they fundamentally transformed it. Together with their better-known contemporaries, these unknown alchemists created an incredibly rich and varied alchemical practice that threatened to burst the bounds of alchemical tradition. The collective presence of all of these types of alchemists—some of whom were quite successful, and others of whom were spectacular failures—forced a discussion about alchemy in early modern central Europe that would have lasting consequences. The resulting debate about true and false alchemy, moreover, was never merely... 

The financial information in alchemical contracts went beyond salaries and bonuses, however it also reveals the extent to which courtly alchemy was embedded in the same entrepreneurial culture of investment as princely mining enterprises in the sixteenth century. The contracts specified the financial stakes involved, clarifying the relationship between risk and profit in alchemical projects. The contract that Michael Heinrich Wagenmann vom Hoff signed with Duke Friedrich of Wiirttemberg on 23 December 1598, for example, was a remarkably compact document of financial responsibility ... 

---