ambix, Vol. 61 No. 4, November, 2014, 319–326
Introduction Analysis and Synthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Joel A. Klein1 1 2
AND
Evan R. Ragland2
Columbia University, New York, USA University of Alabama, Huntsville, USA
The close ties between theory and practice in the history of chemistry are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the emphasis on analysis and synthesis. Historically, these terms can be applied to a host of practices concerned with separating, joining, and altering matter, often with reference to theoretically constructed entities such as elements, principles, and atoms. While historians of chemistry may be familiar with these terms primarily in their modern sense, from the major subdisciplines of synthetic and analytical chemistry, the articles in this volume explore and reaffirm our understanding that analysis and synthesis were important and even central to medieval alchemy and early modern chymistry.1 Analytic and synthetic operations provided the basis of much ancient and medieval alchemy. Zosimos of Panopolis used distillation to separate the volatile spirits and non-volatile bodies around 300 AD, and authors of works in the Jābirian corpus described their analysis of bodies into the elements of earth, water, air, and fire using similar processes.2 Like their Arabic predecessors, many medieval Latin alchemists also believed that metals could be resolved into mercury and sulphur.3 The preparation of medicines, tinctures, and synthetic products, as well as metallic transmutation, also came to define alchemy and to absorb its practitioners. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) and his followers extensively popularised practices of analysis and synthesis and offered a new framework for chymistry, based on Scheidung; that is, the 1
2
3
On the centrality of analysis and synthesis throughout the history of medieval alchemy and early modern chymistry, see William H. Brock, The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), xxv and 177–78; William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 90. For a classic long view of chemical analysis, see Ferenc Svabadvary, The History of Analytic Chemistry (Oxford: Pergamom Press, 1966). On the use of the term “chymistry,” see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998), 32–65. For a recent overview of Greek and Arabic alchemy within the context of a broader history, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–17 and 37–40. Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, 57.
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separation or analysis of a body—usually by fire distillation—into the tria prima of salt, sulphur, and mercury.4 Once analysed, in a process viewed as separation from impurities, they could be recombined into an exalted version of the original substance. Paracelsus called this entire process spagyria, meaning “to separate and (re)combine,” and later chymical authors explained the etymology of this term by referring to the Greek words span and ageirein, which were used to mean “to draw out” and “to bring together.”5 Fire analysis, however, was not the only method used to separate bodies into their composite parts, and following the work of Joan Baptista van Helmont (1580–1644), many chymists criticised distillation in favour of solution analysis. Rather than a sudden or straightforward transition, however, this methodological approach developed in a piecemeal fashion over several centuries. 6 Historians of science have long been intrigued by the broader historical and cultural repercussions of the Paracelsian and Helmontian emphasis on the separation and recombination of the constituents of matter: from the work of Allen Debus, who argued that the work of these early modern chymists constituted a “chemical philosophy” that heavily influenced medicine and challenged both Aristotelianism and Galenism, to studies of the various facets of “chymical anatomy” or “vital anatomy” used by Paracelsus and his followers to understand the composition and distribution of the macrocosm, as well as the microcosm of the human body.7 More recently, Lawrence Principe and William Newman have argued that the legacy of Van Helmont’s emphasis on analysis and synthesis, in tandem with quantitative experimental methods and the notion of mass balance, may be detected in the chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794).8 4
5
6
7
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On Paracelsianism, see Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: Karger, 2nd rev. ed., 1982); Didier Kahn, Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567–1625) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2007); and Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle, Corpus Paracelsisticum: Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Naturphilosophie in Deutschland, Bd. 1–2 (Tübingen: Max Neimeyer Verlag, 2004); Bd. 3 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2013), 2 vols. For discussions of Paracelsian analysis, see Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540–1642) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 162–64, and William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy and the Changing Significance of Analysis,” in Wrong for the Right Reasons, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and A. Franklin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 73–89. On the etymology of “spagyria,” see Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, 128–29; Newman and Principe, “Alchemy and the Changing Signifigance of Analysis,” 79–80; and Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 90. For a major author who explained the etymology of spagyria in this manner, see Andreas Libavius, Commentariorum in librum primum alchymiae partis I. Lib. I, 77 in Alchymia … recognita, emendata, et aucta (Frankfurt: Joannes Saurius, 1606). Frederic L. Holmes, “Analysis by Fire and Solvent Extractions: The Metamorphosis of a Tradition,” Isis 62 (1971): 128–48; Holmes, Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise (Berkeley, CA: Office of the History of Science, 1983); Allen G. Debus, “Solution Analyses Prior to Robert Boyle,” Chymia 8 (1962): 41–61; Allen G. Debus, “Fire Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Annals of Science 23 (1967): 127–47; Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), esp. 23–63 and 104–59; Victor D. Boantza, Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution: Laws of Another Order (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), esp. chs. 1 and 2. Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), vol. 1, 2–3; Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path, 163–65. On chemical anatomy, see also Pagel, Paracelsus, 82–105, 189–96, and Audrey B. Davis, “The Circulation of the Blood and Chemical Anatomy,” in Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, ed. Allen Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1972), vol. II, 25–37. Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 90–91.
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These studies have often focused on the differing conceptions of elements and principles that characterised various chymical and natural philosophical positions. Such traditions have also received extensive scholarly treatment: from Reijer Hooykaas’s early and still useful diachronic survey of the concept of ‘element,’ to Antonio Clericuzio’s Elements, Principles and Corpuscles, and William Newman’s persistent exploration of corpuscular alchemy and chymistry along broadly Geberian, Aristotelian, and Helmontian lines.9 In recent years, the French textbook tradition, characterised by authors such as Jean Beguin (1550–1620) and Nicolas Lemery (1645– 1715), has received particular attention.10 One aim of the present volume is to expand both the chronological and geographical reach of these studies: looking beyond the French tradition of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to identify alternative approaches to elements and principles from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century; especially within the German lands and the Netherlands. The four contributors take analysis and synthesis as a starting point for interrogating the ontological status of chymical entities and analytic products, and the practices by which they were isolated or combined. On what, in particular, did alchemists, chymists, and chemists believe the operations of analysis worked, and into what were the objects of analysis resolved? How were analytic and synthetic processes conceived in theory, and how did such conceptions affect practice? In seeking to answer these questions, the contributors to this volume offer a more historicised portrait of early chemical knowledge (and its relationship to modern chemistry), suggesting promising directions for future study. William Newman questions whether the sulphur–mercury dyad of medieval alchemy should be interpreted as metaphysical entities, arguing that these ‘principles’ were in fact derived from tangible, physical substances, comparable in most respects to the modern substances that still go by those names. Newman addresses the question of the physicality of the alchemical principles by considering several Arabo-Latin and thirteenth-century Latin treatises, written independently of and prior to the immensely influential Summa perfectionis of pseudo-Geber and Testamentum of pseudo-Raymund Lull. Newman argues that writers such as Albertus Magnus and the author of the pseudo-Baconian Breve breviarum viewed sulphur and mercury as existing in various states of purity. For some writers, the presence of impurities explained why sulphur and mercury were found in diverse states of fixity, while for others, these impurities had to be removed to allow for the possibility of transmutation. Authors differed regarding the possibility of transmutation
9
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Reijer Hooykaas, Het Begrip Element: In Zijn Historisch-Wijsgeerige Ontwikkeling (Ph.D. dissertation, Utrecht University, 1933), translated by Hans Kubbinga as The Concept of Element: Its Historical-Philosophical Development (authorised translation, privately printed); Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Kim, Affinity; Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Antonio Clericuzio, “Teaching Chemistry and Chemical Textbooks in France. From Beguin to Lemery,” Science & Education 15 (2006): 335–55.
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but agreed that mercury and sulphur were physical substances that were in turn compounded of humidity and earth. Newman concludes by situating these views on principles within a long-lasting tradition that influenced later medieval and early modern chymistry. Continuing this line of enquiry into the early modern period, Joel Klein shows how several influential German academic chymists explicitly rejected the notions of immaterial, spiritual, or quasi-corporeal chymical principles popularised by the Paracelsian philosopher Petrus Severinus and commonly discussed in the French textbook tradition. Against Severinus the Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) preferred the traditional philosophical definition of elements—as the smallest parts that composed a thing’s matter—both in philosophical terms and as a way of understanding the tangible, corporeal substances of the laboratory. For example, Sennert adopted the Aristotelian principle that similar properties must derive from a similar cause—thus, each instance of material concretion could be ascribed to the chymical principle of salt. Both Thomas Erastus (1524–1583) and Andreas Libavius (1555–1616) attacked the Severinian doctrine of incorporeal principles, the latter drawing on Erastus’s critique to ridicule the idea of dimensionless, and hence infinite, elements. Against such disembodied elements, Libavius articulated a doctrine of the chymical elements of sulphur, mercury, and salt as principiata, or entities made principles by more fundamental elements: the traditional Aristotelian earth, water, air, and fire. In turn, Anton Günther Billich (1598–1640) adopted Libavius’s hierarchical view of the Aristotelian elements and the chymical principles, and extended the corpuscular approach of his father-in-law, Angelo Sala. Like Sala and Sennert, Billich defined chymistry in terms of the separation and joining together of corpuscular parts. These case studies illustrate the importance of taking early modern chymistry as a diverse and competitive series of interactions, especially when considering doctrines of elements and principles. Vera Keller’s contribution to this issue reassesses the work of Christian Adolph Balduin, whose synthesis of novel phosphors has typically been treated as an ‘accidental’ invention rather than the fruit of sustained experiment—a work of ‘making’ rather than ‘knowing,’ unlike Robert Boyle’s similar investigations. Keller shows that the phosphoric investigations of Boyle and Balduin were in many respects parallel, and that the purported differences between them resulted not from Balduin’s association with alchemy, but rather from different citation practices and literary styles—in short, Balduin cited his sources while Boyle did not. Consequently, when Balduin’s various investigations were discussed by others, his own theories about phosphors were neglected and commentators chose to focus instead on the objects themselves. Just as he passed over the names of many of his alchemical sources in his published works, Boyle declined openly to treat Balduin as a philosophical author. Keller’s sketch of these sharply contrasting citation practices suggests important insights into the institutionalisation of new natural philosophies in England and the German lands.
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Keller traces coextensive developments in Balduin’s and Boyle’s inquiries over the course of several decades, arguing that phosphors, besides providing the basis of culturally significant artefacts used to gain favour with monarchs or adorn the walls of cabinets of curiosities, were used by Boyle and Balduin to support particular positions related to alchemical atomism. Phosphors which seemed to imbibe, store, then emit light cohered with the philosophical view that light was by nature both material and corporeal, and that its attraction to the so-called “light magnet” could be explained by elective affinity. Presented as only a maker in English reviews, Balduin was very much a philosopher of phosphors as well.11 Complementing Keller’s study of synthesis, John Powers tracks discussions of chemical analysis from Paracelsian textbooks of the early seventeenth century through Boerhaave to Lavoisier. Herman Boerhaave drew on Boyle’s critique of fire analysis, but moved even farther towards adopting a sceptical position on the utility of corpuscular speculations that exceeded laboratory demonstration. In the laboratory, new chemical properties appeared only through hands-on testing; no theory of chemical elements or principles could predict the selective action of acids on different substances. Moving away from the common seventeenth-century definition of chemistry as the resolution and composition of bodies, Boerhaave concentrated on the physical operations performed by chemical instruments rather than hypothetical elements, and on the production of effects. The elements offered in Boerhaave’s Elementa chemiae resisted decomposition in the laboratory, which made sense given his corpuscular matter theory—there ought to be units so strongly united or so subtle they could serve as the limit of analysis. Yet one could never be sure that these elements were the basic units, since experiments never rendered them up in pure form and the corpuscles themselves could not be inspected by the senses. In place of Lemery’s elements, we have Boerhaave’s native objects, instruments, and operations of chemistry. Indeed, Boerhaave’s critique would influence developments in France—when Lavoisier advanced a strong scepticism about the chemical elements of Macquer and others before him, he echoed Boerhaave’s insistence on the limits of laboratory analysis and the need to avoid ‘metaphysical’ speculations. As all four contributors show, pre-modern attempts to understand the nature of elements and principles were closely related to knowledge of the physical processes by which materials were separated, purified, and combined. As Newman argues, alchemists applied the same processes to extracting the ‘principles’ of mercury and sulphur as they did to purifying ores: cleansing substances from their earthy impurities, roasting them, and smelting them with dregs or ‘drying’ agents. Medieval alchemists sought to detect the presence of these principles in ores and metals through odours revealed during heating, and by lustre, colour, and other suggestive qualities. In Keller’s account, the material qualities of certain substances, including
11
On the interrelationship of making and knowing, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005).
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the startling ability of some phosphors to store and release light, might both demonstrate and provoke theoretical explanations of matter; besides offering scintillating objects of chymical synthesis, fit to grace a princely cabinet. That laboratory practices and materials lay at the heart of alchemy and early modern chemistry should not come as a surprise.12 Yet Klein’s essay also reminds us that such practices might be interpreted differently within the context of diverse traditions; thus Paracelsians, especially after Severinus, maintained the immateriality or quasi-corporeality of their principles, while also linking them to laboratory practice. Nor should the role of principles in shaping practice be neglected. The idea of mercury as some kind of fundamental, metallic principle—and, consequently, a key to metallic transmutation—informed chemical theory and practice from ninth-century Arabic treatises to Boerhaave’s decades of testing in the early eighteenth century.13 The equation of chymical principles with bodies produced at the limit of laboratory analysis is encountered in the work of such disparate figures as Sennert, Boerhaave, and Lavoisier, mutatis mutandis. While these important continuities sometimes reveal very gradual change, as in the shift towards solution analysis, they also contrast with the differences and disputes often encountered at the local level. Thus, to a group of early seventeenth-century German academics, the ‘spiritual’ principles of Severinus and French textbook writers appeared gross absurdities. Against Stahl, Boerhaave refrained from making strong attributions of elemental status or declarations of corpuscular structure. And although Balduin’s work on phosphors dovetailed with that of Boyle, they and their colleagues parted ways over the conventions for using and citing authors and texts. As these cases remind us, the contexts of early modern chymistry resist generalisation, yet also offer many promising directions for further research. We would like to suggest three paths for exploration. First, that we embrace the power of local, contextual history, and continue to trace the multiple genealogies and controversies of pre-modern analysis, synthesis, and matter theory. These topics appear to be particularly well suited for tracing changes and continuities over time, offering a possible means of bridging the major disconnects that still remain between studies of pre-modern chymistry and of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury chemistry. Second, it has unfortunately not been possible within the scope of this special issue to consider the role of analysis and synthesis in early modern commerce and industry—an area that has been the subject of significant studies in the past, and continues to generate important work. The commercial networks within which analytical and synthetic procedures were developed and refined remain a necessary context for investigating medieval and early modern chymistry.14 12
13 14
The close association of the early modern ‘laboratory’ with alchemical and chemical manual processes is succinctly argued in Ursula Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation,” Isis 99 (2008): 769–82; Klein and Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science, 33–37. Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, 35–36. See, inter alia, William Eamon, “New Light on Robert Boyle and the Discovery of Colour Indicators,” Ambix 27 (1980): 204–9; Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 7; Smith, Body of the Artisan; Pamela H. Smith, “In a
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Third, in light of historiographical interest in early modern theories of matter, scholars have tended to concentrate primarily on the analysis of materials into their constituent parts—a trend that, Keller’s article aside, is maintained in the present volume.15 Although there are significant studies of episodes of synthesis from the seventeenth century onwards, these have typically focused on the re-synthesis of analysed materials.16 We hope that scholars will continue to explore the history of synthesis in relation to, but also distinct from, the history of analysis, shedding light, like Balduin’s phosphors, on our appreciation of the place of materials and processes within the wider history of chemistry.
Acknowledgements We warmly thank the anonymous reviewers for their critiques and especially Jennifer Rampling for patience, many suggestions, and good counsel. Earlier versions of the papers in this special issue by Klein, Newman, and Powers were first presented at a HIST symposium in honour of William Newman at the 2013 meeting of the American Chemical Society. During the editing of this special issue, Klein was a Research Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and was generously supported by a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. Ragland received support from a New Faculty Research Grant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Notes on contributors Joel A. Klein is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Columbia University and a Research Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Klein finished his Ph.D. at 14
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Continued Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), 33–58; Ursula Klein, “Apothecary Shops, Laboratories, and Chemical Manufacture in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in The Mindful Hand, ed. Roberts et al, 247–76; Klein and Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science. For instance, Allen G. Debus, “Fire Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries,” Annals of Science 23 (1967): 127–47; Frederic Lawrence Holmes, “Chemistry in the Académie Royale des Sciences,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 34 (2003): 41–68; Mi Gyung Kim. “The Analytic Ideal of Chemical Elements: Robert Boyle and the French Didactic Tradition,” Science in Context 14 (2001): 361–95. Seymour H. Mauskopf, “Lavoisier and the Improvement of Gunpowder Production,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 48 (1995): 95–122; C. A. Russell, “The Changing Role of Synthesis in Organic Chemistry,” Ambix 34 (1987): 169– 80; H. A. M. Snelders, “The Amsterdam Experiment on the Analysis and Synthesis of Water (1789),” Ambix 26 (1979): 116–33; Andre Siegel, “Sir Robert Robinson’s ‘Anthocyanin Period’: 1922–1934—A Case Study of an Early Twentieth-Century Natural Products Synthesis,” Ambix 55 (2008): 62–82. Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesis of urea has attracted particular attention, and chemists from the nineteenth century on have marked out synthesis as the characteristic practice of organic chemists. See John Hedley Brooke, “Organic Synthesis and the Unification of Chemistry: A Reappraisal,” British Journal for the History of Science 5 (1971): 363–92; Peter J. Ramberg, “The Death of Vitalism and the Birth of Organic Chemistry: Wöhler’s Urea Synthesis and the Disciplinary Identity of Organic Chemistry,” Ambix 47 (2000): 170–95. On the resynthesis of analysed materials—sometimes called redintegration—see Reijer Hooykaas, “The Experimental Origin of Chemical Atomic and Molecular Theory Before Boyle,” Chymia 2 (1949), 77–79; Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 67–69, 85, 211; Christoph Meinel, “Early Seventeenth-Century Chemistry,” Isis 79 (1988): 68–103.
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Indiana University in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in 2014 and is now working on the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia. Address: Columbia University, Department of History, 413 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027. Email: [email protected] Evan R. Ragland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He works on chymistry and medicine in early modern universities and the broader history of experimentation, and is revising a manuscript on the culture of experiment at Leiden in the mid-seventeenth century. Address: Department of History, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA. Email: [email protected]
Introduction Analysis and Synthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Joel A. Klein1 1 2
AND
Evan R. Ragland2
Columbia University, New York, USA University of Alabama, Huntsville, USA
The close ties between theory and practice in the history of chemistry are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the emphasis on analysis and synthesis. Historically, these terms can be applied to a host of practices concerned with separating, joining, and altering matter, often with reference to theoretically constructed entities such as elements, principles, and atoms. While historians of chemistry may be familiar with these terms primarily in their modern sense, from the major subdisciplines of synthetic and analytical chemistry, the articles in this volume explore and reaffirm our understanding that analysis and synthesis were important and even central to medieval alchemy and early modern chymistry.1 Analytic and synthetic operations provided the basis of much ancient and medieval alchemy. Zosimos of Panopolis used distillation to separate the volatile spirits and non-volatile bodies around 300 AD, and authors of works in the Jābirian corpus described their analysis of bodies into the elements of earth, water, air, and fire using similar processes.2 Like their Arabic predecessors, many medieval Latin alchemists also believed that metals could be resolved into mercury and sulphur.3 The preparation of medicines, tinctures, and synthetic products, as well as metallic transmutation, also came to define alchemy and to absorb its practitioners. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) and his followers extensively popularised practices of analysis and synthesis and offered a new framework for chymistry, based on Scheidung; that is, the 1
2
3
On the centrality of analysis and synthesis throughout the history of medieval alchemy and early modern chymistry, see William H. Brock, The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), xxv and 177–78; William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 90. For a classic long view of chemical analysis, see Ferenc Svabadvary, The History of Analytic Chemistry (Oxford: Pergamom Press, 1966). On the use of the term “chymistry,” see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998), 32–65. For a recent overview of Greek and Arabic alchemy within the context of a broader history, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–17 and 37–40. Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, 57.
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separation or analysis of a body—usually by fire distillation—into the tria prima of salt, sulphur, and mercury.4 Once analysed, in a process viewed as separation from impurities, they could be recombined into an exalted version of the original substance. Paracelsus called this entire process spagyria, meaning “to separate and (re)combine,” and later chymical authors explained the etymology of this term by referring to the Greek words span and ageirein, which were used to mean “to draw out” and “to bring together.”5 Fire analysis, however, was not the only method used to separate bodies into their composite parts, and following the work of Joan Baptista van Helmont (1580–1644), many chymists criticised distillation in favour of solution analysis. Rather than a sudden or straightforward transition, however, this methodological approach developed in a piecemeal fashion over several centuries. 6 Historians of science have long been intrigued by the broader historical and cultural repercussions of the Paracelsian and Helmontian emphasis on the separation and recombination of the constituents of matter: from the work of Allen Debus, who argued that the work of these early modern chymists constituted a “chemical philosophy” that heavily influenced medicine and challenged both Aristotelianism and Galenism, to studies of the various facets of “chymical anatomy” or “vital anatomy” used by Paracelsus and his followers to understand the composition and distribution of the macrocosm, as well as the microcosm of the human body.7 More recently, Lawrence Principe and William Newman have argued that the legacy of Van Helmont’s emphasis on analysis and synthesis, in tandem with quantitative experimental methods and the notion of mass balance, may be detected in the chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794).8 4
5
6
7
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On Paracelsianism, see Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: Karger, 2nd rev. ed., 1982); Didier Kahn, Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567–1625) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2007); and Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle, Corpus Paracelsisticum: Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Naturphilosophie in Deutschland, Bd. 1–2 (Tübingen: Max Neimeyer Verlag, 2004); Bd. 3 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2013), 2 vols. For discussions of Paracelsian analysis, see Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540–1642) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 162–64, and William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy and the Changing Significance of Analysis,” in Wrong for the Right Reasons, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and A. Franklin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 73–89. On the etymology of “spagyria,” see Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, 128–29; Newman and Principe, “Alchemy and the Changing Signifigance of Analysis,” 79–80; and Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 90. For a major author who explained the etymology of spagyria in this manner, see Andreas Libavius, Commentariorum in librum primum alchymiae partis I. Lib. I, 77 in Alchymia … recognita, emendata, et aucta (Frankfurt: Joannes Saurius, 1606). Frederic L. Holmes, “Analysis by Fire and Solvent Extractions: The Metamorphosis of a Tradition,” Isis 62 (1971): 128–48; Holmes, Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise (Berkeley, CA: Office of the History of Science, 1983); Allen G. Debus, “Solution Analyses Prior to Robert Boyle,” Chymia 8 (1962): 41–61; Allen G. Debus, “Fire Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Annals of Science 23 (1967): 127–47; Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), esp. 23–63 and 104–59; Victor D. Boantza, Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution: Laws of Another Order (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), esp. chs. 1 and 2. Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), vol. 1, 2–3; Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path, 163–65. On chemical anatomy, see also Pagel, Paracelsus, 82–105, 189–96, and Audrey B. Davis, “The Circulation of the Blood and Chemical Anatomy,” in Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, ed. Allen Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1972), vol. II, 25–37. Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 90–91.
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These studies have often focused on the differing conceptions of elements and principles that characterised various chymical and natural philosophical positions. Such traditions have also received extensive scholarly treatment: from Reijer Hooykaas’s early and still useful diachronic survey of the concept of ‘element,’ to Antonio Clericuzio’s Elements, Principles and Corpuscles, and William Newman’s persistent exploration of corpuscular alchemy and chymistry along broadly Geberian, Aristotelian, and Helmontian lines.9 In recent years, the French textbook tradition, characterised by authors such as Jean Beguin (1550–1620) and Nicolas Lemery (1645– 1715), has received particular attention.10 One aim of the present volume is to expand both the chronological and geographical reach of these studies: looking beyond the French tradition of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to identify alternative approaches to elements and principles from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century; especially within the German lands and the Netherlands. The four contributors take analysis and synthesis as a starting point for interrogating the ontological status of chymical entities and analytic products, and the practices by which they were isolated or combined. On what, in particular, did alchemists, chymists, and chemists believe the operations of analysis worked, and into what were the objects of analysis resolved? How were analytic and synthetic processes conceived in theory, and how did such conceptions affect practice? In seeking to answer these questions, the contributors to this volume offer a more historicised portrait of early chemical knowledge (and its relationship to modern chemistry), suggesting promising directions for future study. William Newman questions whether the sulphur–mercury dyad of medieval alchemy should be interpreted as metaphysical entities, arguing that these ‘principles’ were in fact derived from tangible, physical substances, comparable in most respects to the modern substances that still go by those names. Newman addresses the question of the physicality of the alchemical principles by considering several Arabo-Latin and thirteenth-century Latin treatises, written independently of and prior to the immensely influential Summa perfectionis of pseudo-Geber and Testamentum of pseudo-Raymund Lull. Newman argues that writers such as Albertus Magnus and the author of the pseudo-Baconian Breve breviarum viewed sulphur and mercury as existing in various states of purity. For some writers, the presence of impurities explained why sulphur and mercury were found in diverse states of fixity, while for others, these impurities had to be removed to allow for the possibility of transmutation. Authors differed regarding the possibility of transmutation
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Reijer Hooykaas, Het Begrip Element: In Zijn Historisch-Wijsgeerige Ontwikkeling (Ph.D. dissertation, Utrecht University, 1933), translated by Hans Kubbinga as The Concept of Element: Its Historical-Philosophical Development (authorised translation, privately printed); Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Kim, Affinity; Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Antonio Clericuzio, “Teaching Chemistry and Chemical Textbooks in France. From Beguin to Lemery,” Science & Education 15 (2006): 335–55.
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but agreed that mercury and sulphur were physical substances that were in turn compounded of humidity and earth. Newman concludes by situating these views on principles within a long-lasting tradition that influenced later medieval and early modern chymistry. Continuing this line of enquiry into the early modern period, Joel Klein shows how several influential German academic chymists explicitly rejected the notions of immaterial, spiritual, or quasi-corporeal chymical principles popularised by the Paracelsian philosopher Petrus Severinus and commonly discussed in the French textbook tradition. Against Severinus the Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) preferred the traditional philosophical definition of elements—as the smallest parts that composed a thing’s matter—both in philosophical terms and as a way of understanding the tangible, corporeal substances of the laboratory. For example, Sennert adopted the Aristotelian principle that similar properties must derive from a similar cause—thus, each instance of material concretion could be ascribed to the chymical principle of salt. Both Thomas Erastus (1524–1583) and Andreas Libavius (1555–1616) attacked the Severinian doctrine of incorporeal principles, the latter drawing on Erastus’s critique to ridicule the idea of dimensionless, and hence infinite, elements. Against such disembodied elements, Libavius articulated a doctrine of the chymical elements of sulphur, mercury, and salt as principiata, or entities made principles by more fundamental elements: the traditional Aristotelian earth, water, air, and fire. In turn, Anton Günther Billich (1598–1640) adopted Libavius’s hierarchical view of the Aristotelian elements and the chymical principles, and extended the corpuscular approach of his father-in-law, Angelo Sala. Like Sala and Sennert, Billich defined chymistry in terms of the separation and joining together of corpuscular parts. These case studies illustrate the importance of taking early modern chymistry as a diverse and competitive series of interactions, especially when considering doctrines of elements and principles. Vera Keller’s contribution to this issue reassesses the work of Christian Adolph Balduin, whose synthesis of novel phosphors has typically been treated as an ‘accidental’ invention rather than the fruit of sustained experiment—a work of ‘making’ rather than ‘knowing,’ unlike Robert Boyle’s similar investigations. Keller shows that the phosphoric investigations of Boyle and Balduin were in many respects parallel, and that the purported differences between them resulted not from Balduin’s association with alchemy, but rather from different citation practices and literary styles—in short, Balduin cited his sources while Boyle did not. Consequently, when Balduin’s various investigations were discussed by others, his own theories about phosphors were neglected and commentators chose to focus instead on the objects themselves. Just as he passed over the names of many of his alchemical sources in his published works, Boyle declined openly to treat Balduin as a philosophical author. Keller’s sketch of these sharply contrasting citation practices suggests important insights into the institutionalisation of new natural philosophies in England and the German lands.
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Keller traces coextensive developments in Balduin’s and Boyle’s inquiries over the course of several decades, arguing that phosphors, besides providing the basis of culturally significant artefacts used to gain favour with monarchs or adorn the walls of cabinets of curiosities, were used by Boyle and Balduin to support particular positions related to alchemical atomism. Phosphors which seemed to imbibe, store, then emit light cohered with the philosophical view that light was by nature both material and corporeal, and that its attraction to the so-called “light magnet” could be explained by elective affinity. Presented as only a maker in English reviews, Balduin was very much a philosopher of phosphors as well.11 Complementing Keller’s study of synthesis, John Powers tracks discussions of chemical analysis from Paracelsian textbooks of the early seventeenth century through Boerhaave to Lavoisier. Herman Boerhaave drew on Boyle’s critique of fire analysis, but moved even farther towards adopting a sceptical position on the utility of corpuscular speculations that exceeded laboratory demonstration. In the laboratory, new chemical properties appeared only through hands-on testing; no theory of chemical elements or principles could predict the selective action of acids on different substances. Moving away from the common seventeenth-century definition of chemistry as the resolution and composition of bodies, Boerhaave concentrated on the physical operations performed by chemical instruments rather than hypothetical elements, and on the production of effects. The elements offered in Boerhaave’s Elementa chemiae resisted decomposition in the laboratory, which made sense given his corpuscular matter theory—there ought to be units so strongly united or so subtle they could serve as the limit of analysis. Yet one could never be sure that these elements were the basic units, since experiments never rendered them up in pure form and the corpuscles themselves could not be inspected by the senses. In place of Lemery’s elements, we have Boerhaave’s native objects, instruments, and operations of chemistry. Indeed, Boerhaave’s critique would influence developments in France—when Lavoisier advanced a strong scepticism about the chemical elements of Macquer and others before him, he echoed Boerhaave’s insistence on the limits of laboratory analysis and the need to avoid ‘metaphysical’ speculations. As all four contributors show, pre-modern attempts to understand the nature of elements and principles were closely related to knowledge of the physical processes by which materials were separated, purified, and combined. As Newman argues, alchemists applied the same processes to extracting the ‘principles’ of mercury and sulphur as they did to purifying ores: cleansing substances from their earthy impurities, roasting them, and smelting them with dregs or ‘drying’ agents. Medieval alchemists sought to detect the presence of these principles in ores and metals through odours revealed during heating, and by lustre, colour, and other suggestive qualities. In Keller’s account, the material qualities of certain substances, including
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On the interrelationship of making and knowing, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005).
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the startling ability of some phosphors to store and release light, might both demonstrate and provoke theoretical explanations of matter; besides offering scintillating objects of chymical synthesis, fit to grace a princely cabinet. That laboratory practices and materials lay at the heart of alchemy and early modern chemistry should not come as a surprise.12 Yet Klein’s essay also reminds us that such practices might be interpreted differently within the context of diverse traditions; thus Paracelsians, especially after Severinus, maintained the immateriality or quasi-corporeality of their principles, while also linking them to laboratory practice. Nor should the role of principles in shaping practice be neglected. The idea of mercury as some kind of fundamental, metallic principle—and, consequently, a key to metallic transmutation—informed chemical theory and practice from ninth-century Arabic treatises to Boerhaave’s decades of testing in the early eighteenth century.13 The equation of chymical principles with bodies produced at the limit of laboratory analysis is encountered in the work of such disparate figures as Sennert, Boerhaave, and Lavoisier, mutatis mutandis. While these important continuities sometimes reveal very gradual change, as in the shift towards solution analysis, they also contrast with the differences and disputes often encountered at the local level. Thus, to a group of early seventeenth-century German academics, the ‘spiritual’ principles of Severinus and French textbook writers appeared gross absurdities. Against Stahl, Boerhaave refrained from making strong attributions of elemental status or declarations of corpuscular structure. And although Balduin’s work on phosphors dovetailed with that of Boyle, they and their colleagues parted ways over the conventions for using and citing authors and texts. As these cases remind us, the contexts of early modern chymistry resist generalisation, yet also offer many promising directions for further research. We would like to suggest three paths for exploration. First, that we embrace the power of local, contextual history, and continue to trace the multiple genealogies and controversies of pre-modern analysis, synthesis, and matter theory. These topics appear to be particularly well suited for tracing changes and continuities over time, offering a possible means of bridging the major disconnects that still remain between studies of pre-modern chymistry and of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury chemistry. Second, it has unfortunately not been possible within the scope of this special issue to consider the role of analysis and synthesis in early modern commerce and industry—an area that has been the subject of significant studies in the past, and continues to generate important work. The commercial networks within which analytical and synthetic procedures were developed and refined remain a necessary context for investigating medieval and early modern chymistry.14 12
13 14
The close association of the early modern ‘laboratory’ with alchemical and chemical manual processes is succinctly argued in Ursula Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation,” Isis 99 (2008): 769–82; Klein and Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science, 33–37. Principe, Secrets of Alchemy, 35–36. See, inter alia, William Eamon, “New Light on Robert Boyle and the Discovery of Colour Indicators,” Ambix 27 (1980): 204–9; Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 7; Smith, Body of the Artisan; Pamela H. Smith, “In a
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Third, in light of historiographical interest in early modern theories of matter, scholars have tended to concentrate primarily on the analysis of materials into their constituent parts—a trend that, Keller’s article aside, is maintained in the present volume.15 Although there are significant studies of episodes of synthesis from the seventeenth century onwards, these have typically focused on the re-synthesis of analysed materials.16 We hope that scholars will continue to explore the history of synthesis in relation to, but also distinct from, the history of analysis, shedding light, like Balduin’s phosphors, on our appreciation of the place of materials and processes within the wider history of chemistry.
Acknowledgements We warmly thank the anonymous reviewers for their critiques and especially Jennifer Rampling for patience, many suggestions, and good counsel. Earlier versions of the papers in this special issue by Klein, Newman, and Powers were first presented at a HIST symposium in honour of William Newman at the 2013 meeting of the American Chemical Society. During the editing of this special issue, Klein was a Research Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and was generously supported by a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. Ragland received support from a New Faculty Research Grant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Notes on contributors Joel A. Klein is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Columbia University and a Research Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Klein finished his Ph.D. at 14
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Continued Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s Workshop,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), 33–58; Ursula Klein, “Apothecary Shops, Laboratories, and Chemical Manufacture in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in The Mindful Hand, ed. Roberts et al, 247–76; Klein and Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science. For instance, Allen G. Debus, “Fire Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries,” Annals of Science 23 (1967): 127–47; Frederic Lawrence Holmes, “Chemistry in the Académie Royale des Sciences,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 34 (2003): 41–68; Mi Gyung Kim. “The Analytic Ideal of Chemical Elements: Robert Boyle and the French Didactic Tradition,” Science in Context 14 (2001): 361–95. Seymour H. Mauskopf, “Lavoisier and the Improvement of Gunpowder Production,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 48 (1995): 95–122; C. A. Russell, “The Changing Role of Synthesis in Organic Chemistry,” Ambix 34 (1987): 169– 80; H. A. M. Snelders, “The Amsterdam Experiment on the Analysis and Synthesis of Water (1789),” Ambix 26 (1979): 116–33; Andre Siegel, “Sir Robert Robinson’s ‘Anthocyanin Period’: 1922–1934—A Case Study of an Early Twentieth-Century Natural Products Synthesis,” Ambix 55 (2008): 62–82. Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesis of urea has attracted particular attention, and chemists from the nineteenth century on have marked out synthesis as the characteristic practice of organic chemists. See John Hedley Brooke, “Organic Synthesis and the Unification of Chemistry: A Reappraisal,” British Journal for the History of Science 5 (1971): 363–92; Peter J. Ramberg, “The Death of Vitalism and the Birth of Organic Chemistry: Wöhler’s Urea Synthesis and the Disciplinary Identity of Organic Chemistry,” Ambix 47 (2000): 170–95. On the resynthesis of analysed materials—sometimes called redintegration—see Reijer Hooykaas, “The Experimental Origin of Chemical Atomic and Molecular Theory Before Boyle,” Chymia 2 (1949), 77–79; Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 67–69, 85, 211; Christoph Meinel, “Early Seventeenth-Century Chemistry,” Isis 79 (1988): 68–103.
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Indiana University in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in 2014 and is now working on the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia. Address: Columbia University, Department of History, 413 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027. Email: [email protected] Evan R. Ragland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He works on chymistry and medicine in early modern universities and the broader history of experimentation, and is revising a manuscript on the culture of experiment at Leiden in the mid-seventeenth century. Address: Department of History, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA. Email: [email protected]
