Ritter Krieg

From Johann Stemhals, Ritter-Krieg... Hamburg 1595 (reprinted Hamburg 1680). This English translation of some sections of this book made by Sigismund Bacstrom is contained in Ms. Wellcome 1027. Bacstrom s notes are shown in square brackets in italic. This transcription was made by Fred Hatt."... 

Whether Latin or vernacular, this medieval alchemical corpus was becoming increasingly available to sixteenth-century Europeans. Texts certainly continued to circulate in manuscript even a century after the invention of the printing press indeed, until the middle of the sixteenth century, it is likely that most alchemical texts remained in manuscript form (and this is especially true if one takes into account recipe books).23 When Sommering recommended Sternhals s Ritter Krieg to Julius, for example, he could only have had a manuscript in mind, since this fifteenth-century text would not be available in print for another two decades. Nevertheless, from the middle of the sixteenth century onward printers seem to have discovered a healthy market for alchemical texts, particularly those that dealt with medicine and the transmutation of metals, since they issued sixteenth-century editions of older treatises attributed (both pseudonymously and authentically) to authorities such as Raymond Lull and Bernhard of Treviso.24... 

A187. Woodcut from Johann Sternhals, Ritter-Krieg... Hamburg 1580. 

---