From Alchemy to “Chymistry”

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521572446.022

21 - From Alchemy to “Chymistry”

from Part III - Dividing the Study of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

William Newman

Edited by

Katharine Park and

Lorraine Daston

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Katharine Park: Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Lorraine Daston: Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin

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Summary

Between the High Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline of alchemy underwent a succession of remarkable changes, both in its internal configuration and in its outward dispersion. In a word, alchemy moved from a rather marginal position as a discipline concerned mainly with mineralogy, metallurgy, and the products of chemical technology to the center of the European stage, where it became the basis for a comprehensive theory of matter and the justification of a heterodox new medicine, occupying the best minds of the age. All the same, alchemy retained a striking continuity between its medieval and early modern incarnations. Up to the beginning of the Enlightenment, the writers of the popular new genre of “chymical textbooks” were paying tribute to Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient and numinous figure who supposedly founded the art of alchemy (see Copenhaver, Chapter 22, this volume). Until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, these textbook authors made no strict demarcation between “alchemy” and “chemistry,” and despite a misconception popular among historians, they did not normally disavow the transmutation of metals.

The modern distinction between alchemy and chemistry, wherein the former refers exclusively to the transmutation of base metals into gold, is a caricature popularized above all by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. In the Middle Ages, alchemy was commonly viewed as a subordinate and artisanal branch of physics, a sort of “applied science” based on general principles supplied by natural philosophy. It was classed within the field of “meteorology,” that is, the study of matter below the sphere of the moon.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 497 - 517

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572446.022 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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21 - From Alchemy to “Chymistry”

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