Roman Empire alchemy

Nummedal, Tara E. "Practical alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire." In Merchants and marvels commerce and the representation of Nature in early modern Europe, eds. Paula Findlen and Pamela H. Smith, 201-222. New York Routledge, 2002. 

In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his... 

Smith, Pamela H. The business of alchemy science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire. 1994 reprint, Princeton (NJ) Princeton Univ P, 1997. xii, 308 p. ISBN 0-691-01599-6... 

Smith, Pamela H. "Alchemy, credit, and the commerce of words and things Johann Joachim Becher at the courts of the Holy Roman Empire, 1635-82." PhD thesis, Johns Hopkins Univ, 1991. 

Cook, Harold John. Review of The business of alchemy Science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire, by Pamela H. Smith. In Studs Hist Philos Sci 27, no. 3 (Sep 1996) 387-396.. ... 

The Business of Alchemy Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire. 

After Constantine proclaimed Christianity to be the official cult of the Roman Empire around A.D. 330, the Christians sought to eradicate pagan philosophies, including alchemy. Most likely they would have succeeded if members of a heretical Christian sect, the Nestorians, had not preserved alchemical writings. After Nestorius, the leader of the sect, was excommunicated around A.D. 430, he fled to Syria with his followers. The Nestorians took as many pagan manuscripts and books with them as they could and kept them in the mon-... 

P. H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994. 

This book follows Sommering and his contemporaries as they struggled to define what it meant to practice alchemy in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. The dramatic burst of interest in alchemy in this period was accompanied by a great deal of disagreement about some of the most fundamental facets of alchemical practice. What was the best way to gain alchemical expertise, and what kinds of things could alchemists actually produce Was alchemy simply a way to create medicines and precious metals, or must practitioners combine that work with a more sophisticated intellectual or even spiritual project Should they sell their knowledge to patrons or other practitioners Debates about alchemical ideas and practices were hardly new in the sixteenth century, of course from the time... 

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... 

And yet alchemical laboratories proliferated in the early modern period as alchemy s visibility rose. In the cities, courts, and cloisters of the Holy Roman Empire, practitioners and patrons with the means to do so built special buildings for their alchemical work, while others improvised with whatever spaces were available kitchens, churches, apothecary shops, and workshops. Archival remnants of some of these spaces do, in fact, remain these bits and pieces—inventories, architectural details, supply orders, and reports—offer a glimpse of their contours and how space organized the activity inside that can complement the work of archaeologists. This view from the laboratory floor, as it were, not only can begin to fill in some very basic details about how space was employed to organize the production... 

Princely patrons did not punish unsatisfactory alchemical practitioners indiscriminately. Like all citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, sovereigns were bound by laws that carefully regulated the administration of justice. In particular, the early modern alchemical trials were rooted in a tradition of legal writing about alchemy that extended as far back as the thirteenth century. In one important thread of medieval canon law, theological concerns about the art were primary. Alchemy appeared most often as... 

Interestingly, ordinances specifically targeting alchemy seem to have disappeared in the early modern period as alchemy was more fully integrated into European society and culture. When Holy Roman Emperor Charles V issued a new penal code for the Holy Roman Empire in 1535, alchemy... 

---