Megan Piorko.

"The subject of this paper is seventeenth-century alchemist and physician Arthur Dee’s book, Fasciculus Chemicus. This Latin text, printed in Paris by Nicholas de la Vigne in 1631, is a small duodemico book featuring excerpts from canonical alchemical tracts which Dee curated in a particular order to create new alchemical knowledge. This paper looks at four specific copies of this text as a case-study to show the importance of material investigation of hand-press books for textual scholarship. Ghost editions of this text are redescribed as variant states of a single first edition through comparative bibliographical description and historical contextualization. Then, the paper asks what types of strategies could and did printers employ to modify the prefatory material within a single hand-press book for differing intended audiences? What were the driving social and economic factors behind these decisions? Who were the intended audiences? How were such modifications executed within the constraints of printing, collation, and binding practices? This type of analysis returns agency to early modern printers, publishers, booksellers, and authors to alter texts during publication for separate audiences and markets. This paper emphasizes the critical nature of bibliographical description and necessity of examining the materiality of texts to understand the nuances and variations in copies from a single edition during the hand-press period."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19qVY_pW2ak

See the book in question here:

https://archive.org/details/hin-wel-all-...1/mode/2up

On 21st April 1581 the alchemist Thomas Charnock was buried at Otterhampton in Somerset. Charnock was obsessed with alchemy and claimed to have made the philosopher's stone, which he offered to Queen Elizabeth I in exchange for financial support.

Claire Ridgway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spVgXLThSug


See his famous letter to the Queen here:

https://www.alchemywebsite.com/hrs11.html

Guthrie Stewart:

https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Medieval-...B00LA5Q87S

Salam Rassi:

Alchemy in an age of disclosure: the case of an Arabic Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise and its Syriac Christian "translator".


Full text at Academia.edu:

https://tinyurl.com/mver5v7w

Alternative Access option available.

MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES
Arthuriana
Vol. 27, No. 1 (SPRING 2017), pp. 73-94 (22 pages)
Published By: Scriptorium Press


https://www.jstor.org/stable/26443659

A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE BACON SOCIETY, DECEMBER 20TH, 1906.

"ALCHEMY is a subject variously defined by various writers. According to some it is a pretended science, having for its object the transmutation of the baser metals into gold, and those practising it were either dupes or fools. Others maintain that the Alchemists were not in pursuit of material objects at all, but were, in reality, the philosophers and reformers of their period, whose true Ars Magna, disguised under a jargon of symbolism, was a conversion of the baser elements of humanity into the gold of goodness."

http://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/201...ayley.html

On Sale:

The Catalpa Monographs: A Critical Survey of the Art and Writings of Austin Osman Spare

By Dr. William Wallace

https://www.lewismasonic.co.uk/emporium/...-osman.htm

"Featuring 93 colour images and 50 unpublished artworks by Spare this book expands upon the books first publishing in the 1980s. The author returns to his earliest writing as the basis for a newly updated inquiry into the volatile essences of Spare’s art. This is a substantial and thought-provoking book by the most prolific contributor to Sparean scholarship...Wallace has explored not only occult texts and alchemical art, but has also found a rich vein of reference and allusion to the biblical texts, and the art of Blake, Hogarth and Shakespeare."

   

"A complete guide to the Vigenère cipher and the tools you need to decode it."

https://www.boxentriq.com/code-breaking/vigenere-cipher

"Around 1586 Martin Roesel of Rosenthal compiled an alchemical manuscript in northern Germany. Now held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as Mellon MS 27, the manuscript contains several widely circulating alchemical treatises, among them the Semita recta of pseudo-Albertus Magnus and Khalid ibn Yazid’s Liber Trium Verborum, alongside alchemical recipes in both Latin and German. Martin annotated the three booklets that compose Mellon MS 27 extensively, copying
recipes from other sources and writing down his own. Although otherwise unknown, Martin is notable for having hidden some of his notes in cipher. While alchemists were famous for their secretiveness, I will argue that Martin’s use of ciphers represents a different sort of secret-keeping, one that stands to repay systematic study."

Agnieszka Rec, Yale


https://societasmagica.org/userfiles/fil...sue_31.pdf

Chymical Collections: Seventeenth Century textual transmutations in the work of Arthur Dee

Dissertation by Megan Piorko

"This dissertation is a biography of a text, Fasciculus Chemicus (1631). The seventeenth-century life of this text, from its inception to its vernacularization, sheds light on broader natural philosophical and textual issues inherent to alchemical knowledge-making."

https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcon...story_diss