“I hope that News was not true,” wrote Hester Thrale Piozzi in 1799, on having heard of the impending death of Anna Seward, “as Floretta found it in Dr. Johnson’s Tale—to outlive Lovers and Haters, and Friends and Foes; and find one’s self surrounded by those with whom one has no Ideas in common—no Care for Applause nor no Strife of Competition.”(1) Piozzi’s melancholy was to continue, over the next two decades, as she out-lived most of the members of a literary circle in mid-eighteenth century England which had included Piozzi herself, Hannah More, Anna Seward, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson.

This act of remembering, of canonizing a literary circle through memory and anecdote, forms the subject of one of the Beinecke Library’s current exhibitions, “Really As It Was: Writing the Life of Samuel Johnson.” Curated by Diane Ducharme and Kathryn James, the exhibition explores the many biographies of Samuel Johnson’s life which were produced by his friends and acquaintances for an avid public in the days, years, and decades following his death. A web exhibition offers a gallery of the gossip, scandal, bitterness, delight, and fascination with which these works were greeted, read, and answered by the ever-articulate, ever-opinionated members of the Johnson circle. For those whose curiosity is only piqued by the exhibition, scanned manuscripts from the Boswell papers can also be found online. The exhibition is on view at the Beinecke Library through mid-December, 2009.

For further Johnson festivities, follow the word-a-day dictionary blog through its last months and letters. This blog began on January 1, 2009, by offering daily examples from an annotated proof copy of the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). When the proof copy finished, as it does abruptly in the letter P, the blog switched in October to examples drawn from a copy of the first edition owned and annotated by Hester Thrale Piozzi. Join us in the last of S, as we follow Johnson through his reading, as he chooses examples from a particular reading of an English literary canon to support a particular idea of the English language and its meanings.

As the end of 2009 draws near and the tercentennial festivities come to a close, Johnson followers can take comfort in one last exhibition, travelling from Harvard’s Hyde collection to open at the Grolier Club in New York City on December 9. The Harvard exhibition, A Monument More Durable than Brass: The Donald & Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson, was curated by John Overholt and will be on view at the Grolier through February 6, 2010.

1 Hester Thrale Piozzi to Hester Maria Thrale, Brynbella, 19 March 1799. The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784-1821 (formerly Mrs. Thrale), ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 3, 75.

Contributed to Early Modern at the Beinecke by Bryn Savage, a doctoral student in the Yale University Department of Germanic Languages & Literature.  Bryn was a pre-prospectus research fellow at the Beinecke Library in the summer of 2008, working on the development of literary criticism in Germany in the late eighteenth century.

From the Reading Room: This series of postings highlights the research of graduate students, research fellows, and other scholars working in the Beinecke’s early modern collections.

Here we see the title page of the Nutzbares, galantes und curioeses Frauenzimmer-Lexicon or Useful, galant and curious Ladies’ Encyclopedia, first published in 1715. Using the pen name “Amaranthes,” Gottlieb Siegmund Corvinus (1677-1747), a lawyer, notary and poet in Leipzig, attempts to describe and explain all aspects of what he perceives to be the feminine world, from famous women and typical women’s professions, to the minutiae of housekeeping and fashion. Any everyday item that could be used by the eighteenth-century woman, such as a box to hold her writing materials [Schreibe-Kaestlein] or coffee beans [Caffee Bohnen], any recipe she might use or any place that she might visit in her daily life appears here in the 1,000 pages of the Ladies’ Encyclopedia. Corvinus creates no categorical chapters, but rather organizes all topics “in an orderly alphabetical fashion,” as he writes on the title page.

The reader is reminded of the strange yet sublime experience of leafing through Walter Benjamin’s 800-page Arcades Project [Passagen-Werk], which follows a similarly meandering path through the Paris of the late nineteenth century.[1] The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated topics, which vary wildly in conventionally perceived importance, is as jarring and as fascinating in the Ladies’ Encyclopedia as in Benjamin’s convolutes. An entry on cadence is sandwiched between a recipe for salted cod baked in pastry dough [Cabeliau in einer Pastete] and a biography of the Roman queen Tanaquil [also known as Caecilia Caja].

Leafing further in the Ladies’ Encyclopedia, one discovers the biography of a learned sixteenth-century duchess named Renata between entries on the radish family [Rettig] and a legal term for the forgiveness of adultery [Remittiren].

Part practical how-to, part fantastic entertainment, part serious history, the Ladies’ Encyclopedia offers a unique glimpse into the areas of knowledge considered appropriate to women. The contours of women’s knowledge become most obvious when one considers which topics have been left out. As Katherine Goodman notes, geography was not taught to women at the time and thus cities and landmasses are not included in the Ladies’ Encyclopedia (Goodman 18). At the same time, curious household items in use in foreign lands do find a home in Corvinus’ entries.

Here we have an entry on hammocks [Hang-Matten], which, we are invited to learn, are a sort of woven bed “hung in the air between two trees or posts” and “very common in America and other warm places, where one desires to sleep undisturbed by vermin and other poisonous animals” (739). Certain things, which few women would travel far enough from Germany to see, were considered suitable food for the imagination, while more practical information, such as the location of the Americas, remained out of bounds.

In addition to information about the status of women, the Ladies’ Encyclopedia also offers a unique look into the mechanics of the everyday at the time. In few other sources can one find such detailed descriptions of life in early eighteenth-century Germany, such as common wedding customs and butter-making.

It is likely that the consistent detail of Corvinus’s entries on even the most mundane of topics must have seemed curious, even mad, when it was published. Today, however, this detail makes the Ladies’ Encyclopedia one of the most important sources of information on the subject.

Amaranthes, Nutzbares, galantes und curiöses Frauenzimmer-Lexicon. Worinnen nicht nur Der Frauenzimmer geistlich- und weltliche Orden, Aemter, Würden, Ehren-Stellen, Professionen und Gewerbe, Privilegia und Rechtliche Wohlthaten, Hochzeiten und Trauer-Solennitäten, Gerade und Erb-Stücken, Nahmen und Thaten der Göttinnen, Heroinen, gelehrter Weibes-Bilder, Künstlerinnen, Prophetinnen, Affter-Prophetinnen, Märtyrinnen, Poetinnen, Ketzerinnen, Quackerinnen, Schwärmerinnen … ; Sondern auch Ein vollkommenes und auf die allerneueste Art verfertigtes Koch- Torten- und Gebackens-Buch, Samt denen darzu gehörigen Rissen, Taffel-Auffsätzen und Küchen-Zettuln, Ordentlich nach dem Alphabet … abgefaßt … dem weiblichen Geschlechte insgesamt zu sonderbaren Nutzen, Nachricht und Ergötzlichkeit auff Begehren ausgestellet… Leipzig: Bey Joh. Friedrich Gleditsch und Sohn, 1715.

This recent addition to the Beinecke Collection of German Literature was once part of the well known ducal library of the Oettingen-Wallerstein family [Fürstlich Oettingen-Wallerstein'sche Bibliothek] in the Schwabian castle [Schloss] Seyfriedberg. Beinecke call number: Zg17 C811 715n

Further Reading:

Helga Brandes: Das “Frauenzimmer-Lexicon” von Amaranthes [d. i. Gottlieb Siegmund Corvinus (1677 - 1746)], in: Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 22 (1998), Heft 1, S. 22-30.

Brokmann-Nooren, Christiane Weibliche Bildung im 18. Jahrhundert : »gelehrtes Frauenzimmer« und »gefällige Gattin«. – Oldenburg : Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Univ., 1994 [Diss. U. Oldenburg 1992]. http://docserver.bis.uni-oldenburg.de/__publikationen/bisverlag/browei94/kap3.pdf

Katherine Goodman: Amazons and apprentices: women and the German Parnassus in the early Enlightenment. Boydell & Brewer, 1999.

Manfred Lemmer: Nachwort zur Neuausgabe des Frauenzimmer-Lexicons. Insel, Leipzig 1980, S. 8-9

Welcome to the new academic year for Early Modern at the Beinecke, a blog for the British and European print and manuscript collections, 1500-1800, at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Each month, Early Modern at the Beinecke will explore an area of the early modern collections, introducing not only the materials themselves but their stories as objects or collections. As items in a rare book library, books and manuscripts are met and understood in many spaces and contexts. These essays will delve into the translations which occur as works move between the database and the reading room, the stacks and the footnote, the conservation lab and the classroom.

Early Modern at the Beinecke also peeks inside the reading room. The voices of researchers in the Beinecke collections can be heard in “From the Reading Room,” a column featuring postings by visiting researchers, Yale graduate fellows, and other researchers in the collections.

Early Modern at the Beinecke invites its readers to participate in the social life of the Beinecke’s early modern collections. Exhibitions, lectures, new resources, and events relating to the early modern collections will be announced; these are always free and open to the public. Further information on events can be found on the Beinecke’s calendar of events. Questions on the Beinecke’s location and hours can usually be answered on its web-site.

For further information on Early Modern at the Beinecke or on the Beinecke’s early modern collections, please feel free to contact Kathryn James, the Beinecke’s Assistant Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts & the Osborn Collection at kathryn.james@yale.edu.

Two recent acquisitions build on Yale’s holdings of early modern British naval and mercantile papers. Above, the inventory of Henry Wright, an early nineteenth century midshipman in the British navy. Wright’s family lived at Brewer’s Hall, Cheshire, their house neighboring the estate of the 12th earl of Derby, who became Wright’s patron. Having joined the navy in 1825, Wright was rated midshipman in 1826, serving in the Mediterranean and West Indies trade until becoming Captain of the schooner Skipjack in 1839. The archive spans the period 1824-1836, consisting primarily of Wright’s correspondence from 1824-1827 and including letters to his father and to his patrons, Lord and Lady Derby.

Above and below, the list of books which Wright brought with him, including Paul and Virginia, the Vicar of Wakefield, the History of Rome, a Life of Nelson, grammars for Latin, Greek and English, an arithmetic, and Molyneux’s Use of globes.

Below, photographs from another recent acquisition, the papers of the British cargo ship Unity on its ill-fated voyage to the West Indies in 1782. Below the account books for fitting the Unity, including the cost of insurance, alongside account lines such as the travel charges for apprentices from London to Portsmouth.

Captained by Samuel Hurry, the Unity sailed from Portsmouth for Barbados in April, 1782. Below, some of the ship’s papers, including papers on the ship’s convoy and documents relating to the ship’s salvage and trials after the Unity was stranded and plundered off the coast of Cornwall.

These collections are currently being catalogued, but are open for research. Researchers are welcome to make use of the Beinecke collections, and can find further information on registering as a reader under “Planning your Research Visit” on the Beinecke web-site.

Frauen-Zimmer Bibliotheckgen oder Thuelicher Vorschlag / Wie und Auff was Ahrt / für ein Deutsches Frauen=Zimmer / mässigen Vermögens / unterschiedene / außerlesene / und recht nützliche Bücher / zu ihrem Vergnügen / zeitlichen und ewigen Wohlseyn / gar leicht und auff wenig Kosten / angeschaffet werden können. Mit einer kleinen Beylage: Als einem beweglichen Schreiben einer Mutter an ihren zum abgöttischen Pabstthum übergangenen Sohn; und etlichen sonderbahren Denck=Sprüchen / dadurch das Herz in dem Wandel für Gott zu befestigen. Güstrau: Zu finden im Rüdigerschen Buchhandlung, 1705.

The Frauen-Zimmer Bibliotheckgen or Ladies’ Little Library is an instruction manual for ladies on book collecting and was published in 1705. The anonymous male author begins his advice on planning a personal library with a dressmaking analogy. He argues that personal libraries, like dresses, must suit their owners; before sewing, the seamstress examines, age, status, wealth, and temperament of the woman for whom it will be made – and the wise lady will do the same when creating a personal collection of books.

The anonymous author gives some universal advice – in his opinion, it is important to take care of both intellectual and spiritual needs (“Gemuth und die Seele” – 7). At the least, one ought to own a Bible and several devotional texts. Beyond this, a lady might acquire books on history, and housekeeping. He discourages the purchase of “böse Bücher” or “bad books,” such as romances, books on etiquette or the occult. In addition, the author explains the care of books and suggests women share their books with friends and family. Perhaps most interesting is the author’s suggestion that women create, save and pass down their own manuscript materials.

On the frontispiece of the Frauen-Zimmer Bibliotheckgen, we see a young lady in her study, which opens out onto a spacious French garden. In addition to her collection of books, her study also contains an elegant, cloth-draped desk with a notebook, quill and ink set and what appears to be a bookstand at the ready. Her books are arranged by size in a grand, curtained bookcase – there are large folios on the bottom shelf and smaller books above. The young lady herself appears contented and proud; clutching a sheaf of papers in one hand, she gestures confidently toward her books with the other.

Although this engraving shows quite an imposing library for an 18^th-century woman, the author took an egalitarian view to book collecting, writing that almost anyone could own at least the essentials and that every woman ought to buy as many good books as she can afford.

Before the advent of publisher’s bindings, it was common for customers to have several books bound together in a single binding. This small volume contains three slim books.

Contributed to Early Modern at the Beinecke by Bryn Savage, a doctoral student in the Yale University Department of Germanic Languages & Literature.  Bryn was a pre-prospectus research fellow at the Beinecke Library in the summer of 2008, working on the development of literary criticism in Germany in the late eighteenth century.

From the Reading Room: This series of postings highlights the research of graduate students, research fellows, and other scholars working in the Beinecke’s early modern collections.

Starry Messenger: Observing the Heavens in the Age of Galileo
An exhibition at the Beinecke Library, April 18 – June 30, 2009

In the autumn of 1609, the Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the heavens, deciphering the cratered face of the moon, the four satellites of Jupiter, and other previously opaque features of the heavens. When, in 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler responded with enthusiasm, praising the significance of Galileo’s observations with his own Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo, or, Conversations with the Starry Messenger (1610).

To whom else did the stars speak in the early modern period? This selection of engravings, charts, diagrams, and texts reveals the furred and cratered faces, the portents and instruments in European observations of the heavens from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Drawing in part on a recently acquired collection of early modern comet literature, these items explore the fascination and anxiety with the world, its state, and its possibilities of imperfection that infused the early modern European discussions of the stars.

Galileo’s illustration of the constellation of the Pleiades, in the first edition of Sidereus Nuncius.  At top: Galileo’s illustrations of the surface of the moon, also from the first edition of Sidereus Nuncius.

Above: images of the moon from the first pirated edition of Sidereus Nuncius, issued in Frankfurt in 1610.

Above: portrait of a cheerful Galileo, included as the frontispiece to the posthumous Opere (1666).

Hevelius’s image of the astronomer at work (above) and of the phases of the moon (below) in his exquisite lunar atlas, the Selenographia (Danzig: Hünefeld, 1647).

Novelists, as well as astronomers, began to colonize the landscapes of the heavens, as can be seen in this wonderfully witty satire by de Bergerac.  Selēnarhia, or, The government of the world in the moon : a comical history [Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune]. London: J. Cottrel, 1659.

A collection guide, containing further images and works scanned from this exhibition, can be found in the Beinecke Library’s digital library.     This exhibition is one event in Yale University’s celebration of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, and a calendar of lectures, viewings, concerts, and other events has been posted by the Yale Office of Public Affairs.

An exhibition opening will be held at Beinecke Library on Tuesday, April 28, following a lecture by Dava Sobel, author of Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude.  The lecture, sponsored by the Yale University Department of Astronomy, will be held at 4 pm in the Yale Law School Levinson Auditorium.  Both lecture and exhibition opening are free and open to the public.

“A most Notable Example of an Ungracious Son,
who in pride of his heart denyed his own Father, and how for his offence,
turned his Meat to loathsome Toads.
To the Tune of, Lord Derby.”

“To a new playhouse tune
Can Life be a Blessing
That’s worth our possessing?” (and other ditties)

One from several dozen late seventeenth-century ballads with woodcut illustrations which have been scanned and included in the Beinecke’s Digital Images. To find these and others, use the search term Ballads.

“Beauty’s Cruelty, or, the Passionate Lover, An Excellent new Play-Song, much in Request.”

“Love in a Maze, or, The Young-Man put to his Dumps.
Here in this Song you may behold and see
A gallant Girl obtain’d by Wit and Honesty;
All you that hear my Song, and mark it but aright,
Will say true love’s worth gold, and breeds delight.
To a pleasant new Tune, called, The true Lovers delight; Or, The Cambridge Horn.”

Scans of these and other ballads can be found in the Beinecke’s Digital Images collection; they are in the public domain.

From the exhibition and exhibition brochure for “Book of Secrets” an exhibit on alchemy in European popular culture, 1500 – 2000, currently on view at Yale’s Beinecke Library.   A collection guide to some images from the exhibition and the Library’s alchemical collections has been posted on the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections.

I have no Knowledge of it at all,” wrote Ezra Stiles of alchemy. “I never saw Transmutation, the aurific Powder, nor the Philosophers Stone,” the early President of Yale College continued, “nor did I ever converse with an Adept knowing him to be such. … I never had, or made an Experiment with, a Furnace or Alembic in all my Life. I am not versed in the Books of the Adepts; I have seen but few of those Authors, & read less—perhaps all the little I have read collectively would not equal an Octavo Volume.”

In his ability to discuss at length how little he knew about alchemy, Stiles was a characteristic reader of early modern European alchemical literature. By 1777, when Stiles was writing, alchemy was a commonplace of British and European popular culture. From the sixteenth century, books of alchemical secrets were published in almost every European language, and were bought, read, annotated, mocked, discussed, and collected by an audience of skeptics and believers alike. Terms such as the philosopher’s stone entered into the popular understanding, as did the names of alchemical authorities such as Raymond Lull.

Book of Secrets explores the curious centrality of alchemy in the European imagination from the late middle ages through the present. The Yale Library collections of alchemical literature reflect the continuing presence of alchemical works in any well-furnished library, from the first donations of the alchemically inclined Bishop George Berkeley to a fledgling Connecticut college, to the gift to Yale in 1965 of Mary Conover Mellon’s collection, inspired by her treatment by Jung, of alchemical books and manuscripts.

This cursed craft whoso wole exercise,
He shl no good han that hym may suffise;
For al the good he spendeth theraboute
He lese shal; therof have I no doute.
[This wicked craft, whoso will exercise,
He shall gain never wealth that may suffice;
For all the coin he spends therein goes out
And is but lost, of which I have no doubt.]

Chaucer, “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” The Canterbury Tales (1387 – 1400)

By the late fourteenth century, when Chaucer’s yeoman spoke of “this cursed craft,” alchemy had entered into European popular culture by way of translations from Greek and Arabic texts into Latin and European vernaculars. Alchemy entered into European popular culture in the late middle ages, with the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin and the European vernaculars. Based on the tenets of the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and meant to date to the age of Abraham, alchemy, or al-kimya in Arabic, can be summarized as the attempt to decipher a divine presence in the material world. Hermetic philosophy taught its practitioners to look to the natural world to discover the meaning of the macrocosm. The alchemist sought to remove the impurities from matter, in order to reveal its original state and purpose. One of the central processes was the attempt to transform a material from its base to its pure state, such as the transformation of lead into gold, a process known as chrysopoeia. Alchemists also sought to discover the elixir of life, a substance which would cure all diseases and provide longevity or immortality. The philosopher’s stone, the alchemist’s tool in these two endeavours, supposedly granted its discoverer a perfect understanding of the mysteries in which alchemy was shrouded.

Alchemy was also chemistry. Early modern alchemists were intensely concerned with understanding and manipulating matter. Following the example of the influential sixteenth-century Swiss physician Paracelsus, they engaged with the practical complexities of purification and the separation of chemical substances. Alchemical literature deals with the chemical changes brought about through processes of heat, distillation, and evaporation, while instructing its readers in the substances they would require: salt, sulphur, mercury, lead, and others. It describes the chemical effects its practitioners could create or expect: residues, shifts in color, transformations in character or substance. It was a laboratory science, requiring its adepts to build, buy, and manage furnaces and the related equipment, such as crucibles and alembics, necessary to heat materials to great temperatures.

These are not fables. You will touch with your hands, you will see with your own eyes, the Azoth, the Mercury of Philosophers, which alone will suffice to obtain for you our Stone.

Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrvm sapientiae aeternae solis verae (1609)

Alchemy was also mystical, a body of occult knowledge which could be viewed as challenging the teachings of the Church. It is no coincidence that the original Faust, source of the later dramas by Goethe and others, was said to have been an alchemist. Alchemy was frequently prohibited, even while monarchs might hire alchemists to study and practice at their courts. Above all, secrecy was the quintessence of European alchemy. Like Chaucer’s alchemist, the yeoman’s Canon, alchemists were meant to be fiercely protective of their secrets, requiring initiates in the alchemical arts never to practice their science for ill-gotten gain and never to reveal their secrets to the public.

No figure captures the fascination and ambiguity of alchemical literature like that of the alchemical adept. In satires such as Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1612), the alchemist is portrayed as a charlatan. In other works, he reigns as the magus, the adept. Illustrations show the alchemist at work alone in the library; in others, he prays for divine guidance; in still others, he can be seen active and vigorous, at work in a laboratory in the company of assistants and peers. In his pursuit of alchemical knowledge, it is the alchemist who moves from the private sphere of secrets to the potentially shared or public space of the laboratory, the library, or the printed word. This tension between the private and the public, secret and shared knowledge, characterizes alchemical literature.

Because the alchemist’s goal was both spiritual and material, alchemical literature offers an uncanny combination of the practical with the highly symbolic. Core materials, such as mercury and sulphur, were endowed with highly figurative personae and narratives, even while authors described the specific appearances of their chemical metamorphoses in the laboratory. Chemical processes were described with elaborate pageantries of metaphor. One central allegory was that of the chemical wedding, in which male and female elements of sulphur and mercury were joined in a figurative marriage and its consummation. Sulphur was represented by the gold King; mercury, by the silver Moon. This conjunction, or unification, of the two substances through chemical procedures, was the subject of much alchemical illustration and commentary.

I have a daughter Light Saturn that is my darling
The which is mother of all working
And in which four things been hid
A golden seed, a silver seed, a mercury seed & a sulphur seed.

Copied by Isaac Newton in his reading notes on alchemy, Mellon MS 79

Secrecy is often publicly performed in alchemical literature. Emblems—the sun, the moon, the King, the Queen, the green dragon—symbolically enact chemical processes, in the elaborate engravings by which alchemical literature was so often illustrated. Authors also consistently admonish the reader never to speak of alchemy in mixed company, where the knowledge might be misunderstood or misused. The books themselves were shared by readers, as can be seen in the annotations, the exclamations in the margins, the passages underlined in successive inks by successive hands. Whether read or written, practiced or displayed, alchemical literature took secrecy as one of its central and very public tenets.

Alchemy could inspire a quite pragmatic interest in the possibility of personal enrichment. Gold, and the transmutation of metals, was a topic of keen interest on the part of many European rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is no coincidence that alchemical texts were so closely allied with works on mining and metallurgy, on commerce, on the production of gold, and that the authors so often abjured their readers not to speak of the great wealth which their practices—and their books—could generate. Concern with the commercial and practical implications of alchemy, such as the study of how metals could be produced and changed, did not preclude the study of alchemy as a divine, a spiritual quest. One example of this can be found in the work of the English scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. Alchemy was a central focus of Newton’s career, the intensely spiritual concentration on the purification of matter. Newton’s alchemical notebook, shown here, was only one of many similar private works in which Newton recorded his study of alchemy.

Ease him corrupted.
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1612)

European readers were familiar with alchemical motifs and literature, even when they did not believe in alchemy or were actively critical of its practitioners. Ben Jonson, so knowledgeably mocking of alchemical practitioners and processes in The Alchemist, was only one of many satirical commentators on alchemy. In Areopagitica, his famous polemic against censorship, the poet John Milton uses alchemical allusions scathingly, arguing that “I am of those who beleeve, it will be a harder alchymy then Lullius ever knew, to sublimat any good use out of such an invention [i.e., book licensing].” This was no passing flirtation with alchemical imagery, but the mining of a metaphor which Milton knew would be familiar to his readers in its many complexities: the science of alchemy, its authorities such as Raymond Lull, and the tenuous state of alchemy’s premise that its practitioners could transform base metal into sublime material. Alchemy, as Milton knew, occupied a place in the cultural economy, circulated by poets and authors in the coinage of verse, satire, literary defense, and attack.

Par toi, je change l’or en fer
Et le paradis en enfer;

Charles Baudelaire, “L’Alchimie de la douleur,” Les Fleurs du Mal (1861)

By the end of the eighteenth century, alchemy as a science had been overtaken by the emerging discipline of chemistry. Alchemy retained its prominence in European popular culture, but as an occult art, a body of secret knowledge to which authors and artists of the Romantic movements of the nineteenth century turned as an alternative to industrialization and an increasingly scientized view of nature. The literatures of Hermes Trismegistus and Paracelsus were adopted by Romantic authors as powerful symbols of spiritual and psychic transformation. As the example of Baudelaire’s “L’Alchimie de la douleur” reveals, alchemy remained an important corpus for the discussion of ideas of transformation, baseness, and purity.

In the late nineteenth century occult revival, which saw the founding of organizations such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, alchemy was increasingly defined as a magical art, like astrology or tarot, in which mysticism was placed in opposition to scientific rationality. Viewed less as the study of a secret nature than as the search for a lost pre-scientific understanding of the world, alchemy was increasingly valued for the obscurity of its texts and the power of its symbolic imagery.

I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.

W.B. Yeats, “Rosa alchemica,” The Secret Rose (1897)

Ironically, it was as a symbolic knowledge that alchemy was to be associated with twentieth-century science. In the 1920s, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung turned to alchemical literature as an important corpus of symbolic imagery. In Jung’s reading, the early modern alchemists reveal the consistency and perpetuation of certain symbolic processes and images across time. In reading nature symbolically, the alchemists were depicting the human thought process at work. The alchemist’s secret understanding and representation of the world becomes, for Jung, the very public rendition of categories of the human psyche.

It is in this disjointed guise—as mystical art, lost knowledge, symbolic abstraction of the psyche—that alchemical literature has continued to the present. Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum, emphasizes the power inherent in the idea of secrecy, the mysteries and conspiracies which can be written and re-written around the adepts, texts, and sub-texts of alchemical literature. In the contemporary Japanese manga and film, Full-Metal Alchemist, two brothers are enmeshed in political and natural conspiracies as they attempt to use alchemy to resurrect their mother. Corruption, secrecy, and loss remain the powerful themes of alchemy, in Full-Metal Alchemist as in The Canterbury Tales.

Above all, European alchemical literature is a canon, a cultural history in which key authorities are resurrected and key texts are read and interpreted by successive generations of readers. Nowhere is the connection of alchemy to its early modern European roots more visible than in the second life of Nicholas Flamel, early modern alchemist and owner of the philosopher’s stone, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997). At last, and unlike most of his precursors in European alchemical literature, Rowlings’s alchemist has been successful in his quest to discover the philosopher’s stone.

See more images of alchemical texts at the Beinecke Library.

This untitled piece is one of a portfolio of forty drawings attributed to Samuel Cooper (1609 -1672), the English miniature painter. The works are of unidentified subjects, traced in red ink on transparent paper. Beinecke call number: Osborn fb 122.

There are forty drawings in Osborn fb 122, all of which have been scanned and included in the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections. The Cooper portfolio is in the public domain, and these images can be used or downloaded without any need for permissions.