Space, and Secrecy

These kinds of questions about the distinctiveness and physical location of workspaces were a crucial part of putting alchemy into practice in the early modern period. A makeshift laboratory smack in the middle of an urban kitchen, as Brueghel imagined it in his mid-sixteenth-century engraving, would permeate alchemy with a very different set of meanings and practices than a laboratory hidden away inside a princely palace. Early 

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 

Looking around the large hall, Friedrich would have seen a variety of glass distillation vessels. Typically, these included three parts the material to be distilled was heated in the bottom vessel, or cucurbit, condensed in the alembic (distillation head, or Helm) on top, where it then cooled and dripped through a beak into a receiver (Recipient). (See the Labomnt in the center of fig. 3.) Friedrich s Laboranten had a small separation cucurbit, for instance, which could have been used for separating silver and 

Contrary to the stereotypes, then, the Stuttgart laboratory was not hidden underground, bathed in darkness and secrecy, nor was it crammed into a corner of the palace kitchen.28 Rather, the laboratory was founded in its own distinct space in the midst of the ducal gardens, a short stretch from the marvelous Neue Lusthaus, which surely captivated the attention of 

Laboranten at work at once, sharing equipment, furnaces, and presumably information about their work. 

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The information provided in this chapter is limited not only by matters of space and relevance, but also by an additional reason. A number of biotechnological companies and institutions are working in the development of new cultivars with altered starch compositions. Research done by, or on behalf of, commercial enterprises generally is not published in refered journals and is kept secret by the companies until applying for a patent. This policy of secrecy clearly slows down the dissemination of scientific information and deprives scientists of the very helpful peer review (affecting negatively the quality of the research). This tendency, unfortunately, is likely to become more dominant. Limited information is sometimes offered in scientific conferences, but hard data are often missing. 

Nevertheless, princes and practitioners alike found several ways in which they could use space to preserve a certain amount of secrecy—in all of its meanings—even within the larger laboratories. The separation of processes in Weikersheim may have been one response to precisely this problem. William Newman has argued that Libavius s Chemical House separated the various processes leading to the philosophers stone into different rooms for exactly this reason, thereby "insur[ing[ that an outside... 

Another function of this rule of secrecy is to provide a safe space for members of the group to talk about their feelings and experiences. You are not going to share your deepest feelings if you think they will be broadcast all over town. This kind of confidentiality is used in almost all growth groups. 

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