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Alchemy Academy archive
December 2005
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Subject: ACADEMY: Information sought regarding Stolcius
From: Michal Pober
Date: 1 Dec 2005

Many thanks to Hereward for offering the material from your thesis
which we may well quote and of course credit the source.

If you're in Germany [you speak about crossing the border to pay us a visit]
then by all means do so. We are planning an event next September
in conjunction with some outside organisations which might make an
especially good excuse to do so. More news on that before the end of the
year.

And thank you José Rodríguez Guerrero for your suggestions. The Czech
text we should be able to track easily; I'm not sure where we'll locate
the other one.

With best regards,

Michal Pober

Subject: ACADEMY: Nicolas Barnaud
From: Jean-Yves Artero
Date: 7 Dec 2005

I am interested in the fact that according to some sources the French
alchemist Nicolas Barnaud (XVIth century ) at some stage used
the pseudonym of Nicolas de Montand . Here is an example:

http://fr.isbn.pl/A.BARNAUD-Nicolas

My main question is following: For this Protestant (Calvinist) alchemist
native of Crest (Drôme) in Dauphiné, who also used to call himself
NDC (Nicolas De Crest), what is the real name to choose, considering
the fact that according to other sources he really
wore the name of Nicolas de Montand?

A last one, if you please: Are there other references for him than
the one already mentioned in this Academy?

Thomas Willard, The enigma of Nicolas Barnaud, an alchemical
riddle of early modern France (see Adam McLean's post of
20 Dec 2001)

Sincerely yours,

Jean

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Liz O'Mahoney
Date: 9 Dec 2005

In October 2003, Rafal T. Prinke wrote in an Academy email:

"I have seen a number of post-mortem inventories of burgher's
estates and often their private libraries contained alchemical works,
even though they were not "professional" alchemists but merchants
or craftsmen of other specialisations."

I wanted to reference this point in my thesis and was wondering
whether any member could offer any examples or bibliographic
evidence of alchemical works in inventories of burgher's estates -
are there any published references to such inventories or are any
catalogue refs known?

Any help on this matter would be much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Liz O'Mahoney

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Rafal T. Prinke
Date: 11 Dec 2005

Dear Liz,

>I wanted to reference this point in my thesis and was wondering
>whether any member could offer any examples or bibliographic
>evidence of alchemical works in inventories of burgher's estates -
>are there any published references to such inventories or are any
>catalogue refs known?

I cannot give you precise details - I have certainly seen alchemical
works in Polish inventories but it was a number of years ago and
I wasn't researching them with alchemy in mind - so I have no notes.
Some such inventories from Polish towns were published. One
example is:

J. Wislocki, S. Nawrocki, Inwentarze mieszczanskie z lat 1528-1635
z ksiag miejskich Poznania. Poznan 1961, [Panstwowe Wydawnictwo
Naukowe]. Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne Oddzial w Poznaniu.
Materialy Sekcji Historii Poznania [3], ss. XXIX, nlb. 1, 636.

If you think examples from Poland would be useful to your thesis,
I may try and check the above and other similar publications at the
library but the problem is that they would not have "alchemy" in
the index, so it is a matter of going through them page by page, finding
book lists, and recognizing alchemical titles (often very imprecisely
quoted).

Best regards,

Rafal

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Adam McLean
Date: 11 Dec 2005

Dear Liz,

In my experience only very few private libraries were inventoried.

In modern times one can find these through auction sale catalogues. A
modern example of this is :

Catalogue of a choice selection of books from the valuable library of the
late Mrs Atwood of Knayton, Thirsk, Yorks. On sale by William Tait,
Publisher and Bookseller, 37 Dunluse Avenue, Belfast, Ireland. c.1908.
56p.

There are many examples of such.

There are some earlier inventories, for example that of Newton
and also of the american John Winthrop

The alchemical library of John Winthrop, Jr. (1606-1676)
and his descendents in Colonial America.
Ambix 11 (1) Feb 1963, p33-51.

Very few actual inventories exist from this period, but that
does not mean that the contents of someone's library cannot be
reconstructed.

An example is the library of John Dee which was reconstructed
by an enormous amount of research locating books that bore his
signature in the various libraries to which they had become distributed
throughout the centuries.

In reality even major institutions have incomplete records of their
own holdings. It is bad enough with printed books, but when we come
to manuscripts the situation for the researcher is dreadful.
Many major institutions, such as the Vatican, only have old hand written
inventories with no indexes, of their early collections. In order to
create a listing of the alchemical manuscripts in the Vatican holdings
I had to spend a number of days reading through thousands of pages
of one line descriptions of manuscripts in order to find the very few
alchemical items. I must have missed many in doing this tedious task and
others were invisible to me because they were not described using any word
that indicated an alchemical content. In doing so I 'discovered' a latin
version of the Flamel Hieroglyphics, that no one had found before.
This is the kind of primary research that still needs to be done. Even
the British Library has not yet put the Sloane manuscript descriptions
into its database. The alchemical collection at Kassel (which is
essentially the library of Moritz of Hessen-Kassel) still awaits
description, and I cannot even get the library to photocopy the hand written
inventory for me. Some months ago on this academy group we found that
manuscripts in the Austrian National Library were not necessarily easy to
find through their catalogues.

There must be hundreds of important alchemical manuscripts buried
away in major institutions that we do not yet know about. We are still
in the dark ages are regards proper listings and descriptions of
alchemical manuscripts. I find it very difficult not to hold back laughter
when people think they can find detailed information about such
material through the Internet. I wish it were so, but I suspect I will
long dead before even a small fraction of this material is described
and made accessible. It is depressing to think that there are really
interesting alchemical manuscripts out there, hiding under some mere
shelf mark, 'C.104.71B' or whatever, that will not be recognised for
the treasures they are until some brave soul goes and requests access to
them.

Often we have to work backwards. For example, in the Bibliotheque
l'Arsenal in Paris there are a number of items described as being
from the library of M. de Paulmy. So one could reconstruct this person's
library by locating all the books with his bookplate. This needs a great
deal of time and will power and thus such a thing is usually only done
for major figures (say a modern literary figure such a W.B. Yates). Ph.D.
students don't seem to queuing up to tackle alchemical collections of totally
unknown people. One could hope that de Paulmy left a hand-written inventory
but this would be unusual.

Adam McLean

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Jean-Yves Artero
Date: 11 Dec 2005

Dear Liz,

There certainly is an additional German library which is worth studying,
and by the way already was by Jost Weyer in his book:

Graf Wolfgang II. von Hohenlohe und die Alchemie ( Alchemistische
Studien in Schloss Weikersheim 1587-1610 ), Thorbecke, Siegmaringen,
1992 ( ISBN 37995-7639-8)

This book is in German and consists in a study of the relationship between
Wolfgang and alchemy; an extensive study of his library is included.

Regards,

Jean

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Rafal T. Prinke
Date: 11 Dec 2005

Dear Adam and Liz,

>In my experience only very few private libraries were inventoried.

What I referred to were not bibliographic inventories but
those that can be found in legal sources. I am not sure about
other countries (in England the "inquisitio post mortem" was
concerned with land estates only, I believe) but in Polish towns
it was obligatory for the city council to record all the belongings
of the deceased. The quality of these records varies but often
they are quite detailed and list titles and authors of books.
They are, therefore, a valuable source for scientific and literary
interests of burghers, and prove they were not only concerned
with their businesses.

Another possible source for such information are last wills.

Best regards,

Rafal

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Elizabeth O'Mahoney
Date: 11 Dec 2005

Dear Rafal,

Thanks ever so much for that. That really is just what I was after -
something specific to footnote. And many thanks also for your offer
to help further, but thankfully no need! In the introduction of my thesis
I really wanted to make the point you made in your earlier email -
that the practice and theory of alchemy wasn't restricted to 'professionals'.
Its a shame the responses to your query about alchemy as an intellectual
pastime quickly went off on a tangent - I was really interested in that
particular issue myself.

Thanks again and best wishes,

Liz

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Eugene Beshenkovsky
Date: 12 Dec 2005

Terrific, Rafal!

Same story in Russia. They did describe the libraries of deceased,
bankrupt and during criminal investigations. Descriptions are horrible,
but identifying records is much easier these days. There are also
plenty of auction catalogs (Grolier Club in New York has a very
good collection)

All the best,

Eugene Beshenkovsky

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Elizabeth O'Mahoney
Date: 12 Dec 2005

Many thanks to everyone for their helpful responses.

You're right Adam, it is a shame that more PhD students don't address
the issue of private collections. My thesis crosses many disciplines
and I have found that most embryonic or non-mainstream subjects
(for example, women in early modern Europe or alchemical painting)
suffer from a dearth of micro-historical research. Given the relatively
new pressures of time and money (3 years + 1 writing up) and the
demand for the 'right' results, fewer and fewer students can actually
undertake the thorough data collection and cataloguing necessary for
proper and helpful scholarship - especially if, like mine, the research
isn't concerned directly with primary literatures.

Given also the difficulties of getting published and the getting a job
in academia, I think a lot of doctoral theses are simply abandoned
when they are finished and as such their findings go unnoticed.

On Adam's suggestion, I'm planning on compiling a list of all
known alchemical genre paintings, so that future researchers in
the area might have a new starting point at least. Perhaps other
doctoral students in other areas could think about doing something
similar? Considering how much post-grads benefit from both the
site and the Academy, I'm sure many would value the opportunity to
give something back.

Just a thought - sorry for the tangent...

Best wishes

Liz

Subject: ACADEMY: Inventories of private libraries with alchemical works
From: Adam McLean
Date: 13 Dec 2005

Dear Liz,

>I'm planning on compiling a list of all known alchemical genre paintings,
>so that future researchers in the area might have a new starting point
>at least. Perhaps other doctoral students in other areas could think
>about doing something similar?

This would be really useful. I have just this weekend read Jane
Corbett's thesis 'Painted Science: Convention and change in 17th
Century Netherlandish Paintings of Alchemists, Physicians and
Astronomers.' Queens University, Ontario, Canada, 2004.

It is a good survey of the material and, though she showed and discussed
a relatively large number of these paintings, she did not attempt to draw
up a complete list of such works, and seems to have located most items
through secondary sources. It would have been a really good use
of her time to have made a complete list for her Ph.D. But perhaps
we will have to wait till you complete your own listing.

I know how difficult it is to gather such information as one has to trawl
through loads of gallery and exhibition catalogues. I do know of some
interesting paintings which you may not know of. For example, one
in the Art Gallery in Dundee here in Scotland. If you are including
19th century paintings - I myself have two small works in the style of
Charles Meer Webb.

Perhaps if anyone else is interested in contributing information
towards building a list of paintings depicting alchemists, we can
pool the information and pass this back to you to co-ordinate.

Adam McLean

Subject: ACADEMY: Stolcius translations
From: Rafal Prinke
Date: 15 Dec 2005

Dear Academy,

I wonder if anyone has easy access to the facsimile
of the German version of Daniel Stolcius' _Viridarium
chymicum_? If so, I would be grateful for the text
of the epigram on Sendivogius (emblem 27) - just 6 lines.

It seems that there were three reprints of it:

Chymisches Lustgärtlein.
Ed. by Ferdinand Weinhandl.
facsimile of 1624 edition
Wiss. Buchges., Darmstadt 1964, 1975, 1987.

I would also be glad to obtain the modern French and
Italian translations, should someone happen to have
one of these at hand:

Viridarium chymicum ou le jardin chimique.
Ed. by Bernard Husson.
Editions Medicis, Paris, 1975.

Viridarium Chymicum
Ed. by V. Verginelli.
Nardini, Firenze, 1983.

Finally, I have the original Latin text but it comes from
a secondary source and I am not absolutely sure if it
is exact - especially as far as capitalisation and indenting
is concerned. I know this is less likely, but perhaps
possible for someone to check it against the original:

XXVII
Michael Sendivogius, Polonus
Supresso tacitus quam vis hic nimine vixit,
Fama sed e tenebris protulit hocce nigris.
Praga triurbs primo scriptum conspexit, opus que,
Bissenis scriptis quod docet ille suis.
Humectat terram Saturnus, dixit, habentem
Phoebe tuos flores & Vaga Luna tuos.

My concern is about "nimine" which is clearly "nomine"
but perhaps was misspelt originally. Also capitalised
"Vaga" is a bit strange (or meaningful?).

Best regards,

Rafal

Subject: ACADEMY: Stolcius translations
From: Adam McLean
Date: 15 Dec 2005

Dear Academy,

>I wonder if anyone has easy access to the facsimile
>of the German version of Daniel Stolcius' _Viridarium
>chymicum_?

I attach a scan from the Weinhandl facsimile 1964.

Adam McLean

Subject: ACADEMY: Stolcius translations
From: Rafal T. Prinke
Date: 15 Dec 2005

Dear Adam,

Thank you very much! That was exactly what I needed.

It is interesting how this version (translated into
German by Daniel Meisner, himself an author of emblem
books but not alchemical ones) differs from
the original. Generally the meaning is retained
but many details and symbolic words were changed.

This was the text from which the English translation
was produced by one Nicolaus and published as
_The little mystic-magic picture book_ (1937), which
was later used by Paul Allen in his _A Christian
Rosenkreutz Anthology_ (1981). The English translation
from the original Latin was published by John Read
but only for this Sendivogius emblem, not the whole book.

Best regards,

Rafal

Subject: ACADEMY: Stolcius translations
From: Joaquin Perez
Date: 19 Dec 2005

Dear Rafal,

I have found some information concerning Viridiarum Chymicum.

In the 1975 French edition by B. Husson, appear "nomine"
and "vaga", in the latin text (p. 164).

The French translation of emblem XXVII is as follows (p.165):

Bien qu'il ait discrètement vécu dans l'anonymat
La renommée le tira de l'obscurité
A Prague, la ville triple, ses travaux et ses écrits,
Rédigés en douze traités, ont d'abord été connus.
Saturne humecte, dit-il, la terre dans laquelle naissent
Tes fleurs, ô Phoebus, et celles de l'errante Lune.

Best regards,
Joaquin

Subject: ACADEMY: Stolcius translations
From: Rafal T. Prinke
Date: 20 Dec 2005

Dear Joaquin,

>The French translation of emblem XXVII is as follows (p.165):

Thank you very much! This is very helpful.

Thanks also to Jean-Yves Artero who sent me the same transcription off-list.

Best regards,

Rafal