̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - alchemy

Body, soul and gold: quests for perfection in English alchemy

fpjl2 — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:21:41 +0000

We are often told that ‘balance’ is the key to life – work/family balance, a balanced diet, and so on. But in early modern England, the quest for the perfect balance was thought to lead to prolonged life, more gold than could be dreamed of, and even the possibility of surviving the apocalypse.

Alchemy was the science that made these goals seem possible. We think of alchemists as fixated on precious metals, but alchemy overlapped with a field with which we are all familiar – medicine, and the fight to stay alive.

For Dr Jennifer Rampling, from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the origins of English alchemy are bound up with beliefs about medicine and disease. Rampling’s research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, takes a long-term view, spanning centuries – from 1300 to 1700 – and tracing the thread of English alchemy through hundreds of texts and manuscripts, taking in medicine, religion and culture.

At the start of this period, medicine was still guided by Ancient Greek and Roman notions about the need to balance the body’s four humours – black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. If a person was sick, an ‘imbalance’ of the humours was assumed, and it was the physician’s job to rectify the situation by restoring equality.

“According to conventional academic medicine, illness wasn’t something that invaded your body from outside. Everyone had their own individual ‘complexion’ of humours, and to rebalance this required a more-tailored, systemic healing method,” explained Rampling.

“A common approach was to try and forcibly ‘purge’ excess humours, often considered the cause of illness, in order to rebalance. Bleeding and vomiting were routine forms of treatment.”

But some diseases did not fit this ancient framework, and when the Black Death ravaged 14th-century Europe, killing tens of thousands regardless of individual complexions, physicians needed a new kind of medicine. Alchemy offered hope for a last-ditch cure.

A new alchemical medicine came into vogue – known as ‘quintessence’ – which went beyond conventional remedies, aspiring instead to the celestial. Made by repeatedly distilling alcohol, quintessence was used to extract essences from plants and metals, particularly gold.

In the medieval world view, the Earth was composed of the four Aristotelian elements: earth, air, fire and water. However, the heavens were made of a perfect, fifth element, immune to change and corruption. For alchemists, their distilled quintessences echoed this heavenly element, offering a potential cure by ejecting imperfection from the body.

“Plague was supposed to kill by poisoning the heart. But these elixirs were so perfect that they couldn’t coexist with poison. ̽��ֱ��corruption would be literally forced out of the body – restoring the balance of health.”

Chemical medicine began to catch on. Today, we aim for medication without violent side-effects. But in early modern England, the fact that powerful bodily reactions could be produced by ingesting tiny amounts of a chemical substance was seen as hugely impressive.

“Patients often welcomed strong, physical reactions to remedies – such as antimony compounds, which make you projectile vomit – because they saw them as indicators of effectiveness; perhaps that some blockage was being cleared,” said Rampling. “If you think of your body as a sack of fluid humours, you will probably want to see, and feel, movement.”

But if such concoctions could transform the flesh, why not metals as well? Rampling talks of ‘slippage’ between medical and metallurgical alchemy, and the most sought- after elixirs – such as the ‘vegetable stone’, a focus of her research – were believed to both heal sickness and transmute metals, purging impurity to leave only perfection.

Rampling has been in the lab with Dr Peter Wothers, from the Department of Chemistry, attempting to decipher an encrypted recipe for the vegetable stone by 15th-century alchemist George Ripley, perhaps the most influential of all English alchemists.

“If you distil vinegar several times, you can use it to dissolve lead. That results in a gum that Ripley called the ‘Green Lion’, but that modern chemists would think of as lead acetate,” explained Rampling. “Distil this, and a white smoke is produced which – if you collect and condense it – forms a clear fluid. Ripley thought this ‘menstruum’ was the basis for the vegetable stone.” But the recipe fades into opacity as the alchemist’s language becomes increasingly enigmatic.

Alchemical practices and ingredients were often concealed using symbolic, riddling language, enticing with their hint of otherworldly secrets, but ultimately difficult to decipher. This language is magnificently displayed in the ‘Ripley Scrolls’ – emblematic scrolls full of dazzling imagery, depicting dragons, angels, turrets in the clouds and giant droplets of blood.

These scrolls baffle at every level. ̽��ֱ��design is probably not by Ripley at all – it was attributed to him after his death, when his fame had spread. Their meaning was also subject to distortion over time. For 300 years, copyists emphasised different aspects of the scrolls’ imagery, struggling to make sense of their source.

Such eye-catching manuscripts offered alchemical practitioners one way of marketing their expertise. Knowledge is power, and the natural and medical knowledge promised by alchemical treatises could be used as a bartering chip for social mobility by those who claimed to be its gatekeepers.

“A lot of the alchemists’ rhetoric is about protecting the secret: knowledge that is too dangerous to fall into the hands of the ignorant or rapacious,” said Rampling. “In reality, they had to be discreet with this knowledge, since it was their livelihood.

“Practitioners could use this knowledge to win the patronage of princes and nobles, by dangling the possibility of long life, riches and secret wisdom. ̽��ֱ��imagery of the Ripley Scrolls refers to medicine as well as transmutation – all in a very glamorous package.”

Besides prolonged life and wealth, alchemy also offered insight into the secrets of nature, and even divine power. In Aristotelian cosmology, the Earth itself was flawed as it lacked the unchanging perfection of the heavens. As Rampling points out, this model “mapped very nicely” onto a Christian theology that viewed the natural world as damaged by original sin: “If nature was poisoned by the Fall, then alchemy promised to redeem it. It’s no coincidence that the Ripley Scroll (pictured) shows the Garden of Eden.”

By generating perfection on Earth, alchemists could claim they were doing God’s work. ̽��ֱ��quest for the perfect elixir, able to purge both man and metal, had a powerful apocalyptic resonance.

For hundreds of years, Christian prophets claimed that the end of the world was close. On Judgement Day, God was expected to ‘purify’ the Earth with divine fire – only the perfect could survive. Some alchemists argued that the possessor of the elixir would play an important role. This idea resurfaced in Elizabethan England, and was presented to Queen Elizabeth I a number of times.

But corruption and redemption were also allegories for material processes. Tellingly, the Scroll’s Adam and Eve are not eating the biblical apple, but bunches of grapes. Rampling has an answer: “Wine made from grapes produces both vinegar and the quintessence – key ingredients of the vegetable stone.”

For all its striving for perfection, alchemy remained grounded in the physical, requiring its practitioners to get their hands dirty. For Rampling, there is a romance in the alchemists’ relationship with the world, one we have perhaps lost.

“These people knew materials in an intimate way – they would taste them, smell them, listen to them. There are lots of descriptions in manuscripts of substances making cracking sounds, or producing a heavenly odour or bitter taste. Alchemists were early explorers of the material world. With only their senses and imagination to guide them, they had to be attuned to the slightest variation.”

From the elixirs of legend to transmutation of base metals into gold, medieval medical practice and social mobility were steeped in alchemy.

A lot of the alchemists’ rhetoric is about protecting the secret: knowledge that is too dangerous to fall into the hands of the ignorant or rapacious.

Jennifer Rampling

Fitzwilliam Museum

Detail from the Ripley Scroll housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum

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All is not what it seems: the blurred boundaries between alchemy and medicine

amb206 — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 06:13:04 +0000

In popular culture alchemy is portrayed as the stuff of sorcery and skulduggery with the madcap alchemist presiding over cauldrons of bubbling liquids. Yet the image of the alchemist as a solitary figure on the margins of society is only one part of a far more complex story: a way of making sense of the world that emerged in Egypt in the first centuries of the Christian era. Alchemy percolated through Middle Eastern and Western history right up to the 18th century, when the study of matter became part of the new academic discipline of chemistry. Along the way, alchemists played a key role in shaping another discipline – medicine.

Some of the world’s leading scholars on the history of science and medicine will gather this week to unpick the lost alchemical strands of Western culture at a major conference taking place at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. ̽��ֱ��meeting, Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to Enlightenment, will be the first of its kind to bring together leading experts on medieval and Renaissance medicine, such as Nancy Siraisi, recipient of a prestigious MacArthur grant at City ̽��ֱ�� of New York, with the world’s foremost alchemy scholars, including William Newman, based at Indiana ̽��ֱ�� and an expert on Isaac Newton’s alchemy.

̽��ֱ��meeting will also reveal new findings by junior scholars – from Gabriele Ferrario, who is literally piecing together the secrets of Hebrew alchemy from fragments of manuscripts in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Genizah collection, to Tuna Artun, a PhD student at Princeton ̽��ֱ��, who is tracing alchemy and medicine at the 17th-century Ottoman Court.

̽��ֱ��meeting will challenge the notion that alchemists were magicians or frauds, primarily concerned with making gold, and help to foster a new understanding of the place of alchemy in the pre-modern world. Speakers will show how alchemists were active and influential at all levels of society: men and women who used alchemical ideas as a way of seeking material, medical, and spiritual perfection, as well as wordly success. Some were artisans who borrowed techniques from other crafts, their names now lost to obscurity; while others hobnobbed with popes and princes.

Alchemy also held fascination for thinkers who are now associated with the rise of modern science. In the early 20th century, scholars were shocked to discover just how deeply Isaac Newton, regarded as one of the founders of modern physics, was obsessed by alchemy. His notebooks contain over a million words on the subject of alchemy – more than he ever wrote on physics – and reveal his meticulous study of transmutation and the ‘vegetation’ of metals in his laboratory in Trinity College.

Yet the secrets of alchemy’s success lay in the search for medical remedies as much as the quest for gold. At a time when life was precarious and often cut short by diseases, from leprosy to the Black Death, alchemists struggled to gain insight into the workings of the universe and the human body. Alchemy offered the ‘panacea’ – a medicine capable of healing all diseases. Unsurprisingly, many medical practitioners were also alchemists, employed as personal physicians by European monarchs from James I of England to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.

“It takes a massive leap of imagination for us in the 21st century even to attempt to see the world as alchemical practitioners did,” said Dr Jennifer Rampling, a research fellow at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and one of the conference organisers. “For instance, strict boundaries between alchemy and what we now call ‘chemistry’, ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ did not exist in early modern Europe. If a doctor prepared medicines using an alchemical process, was he doing medicine or alchemy? Historians may argue about that now, but these debates may have seemed nonsensical to the physician.”

In early modern manuscripts, medical and alchemical recipes are often found side by side. “When we look at these writings, we find that even metallic transmutation could be seen in medical terms,” said Dr Rampling. “Chemical reactions, such as dissolution or coagulation, were described in terms of human reproduction, sickness, death, and rebirth. And medicinal elixirs created by distilling liquids – such as vinegar and wine – were sometimes thought to transform metals as well as prolonging human life and renewing youth. These remedies went beyond conventional medical practice, because they relied on alchemical explanations of chemical change and the attainment of very simple, ‘perfect’ substances that could not occur in nature.”

It’s tempting to assume that alchemy and the world view it cultivated somehow morphed into what we know as modern science by a process of pushing back the boundaries of empirical knowledge – but the truth is far more complex. “Practising alchemists took a ‘hands on’ approach to nature,” said Dr Rampling. “They were getting their hands dirty with furnaces and chemical substances while other scholars pursued more abstract speculations. This might sound like useful empirical investigation to us, but alchemy’s practical dimension didn’t always count in its favour – in medieval Europe, theoretical disciplines had more prestige than manual labour, and alchemy was never formally accepted into the university curriculum.”

̽��ֱ��hands-on aspect is another quality that alchemy shared with medicine, although physicians were more successful in establishing their subject within medieval universities. Medicine became part of the academic mainstream: taught at universities, and was regulated by guilds and colleges of physicians. In the meantime, alchemists increasingly adopted the language of secrecy, passing their secrets down through encoded texts, or by teaching apprentices.

Much of the literature pertaining to alchemy is written using elaborate allegories or codes intended to preserve the secrecy of recipes. “To understand what alchemists were actually doing, you have to navigate their writings. Sometimes the key to reading one passage lies in a completely different text or tradition: that’s why it is so important for researchers to share their areas of expertise. ̽��ֱ��conference is an exciting opportunity for experts in different fields to help put the pieces of this huge puzzle back together,” said Dr Rampling.

̽��ֱ��conference will look both at the big picture in terms of the emergence of disciplinary identities, such pharmacy, medicine and chemistry, and at the fine grained detail of how ingredients, practices and apparatus were devised and shared by alchemists and doctors. Participants will also look for common themes linking different historical periods – from Islamic Persia to Enlightenment France – as well as changes and new developments. In doing so, they will be pooling a wide range of skills.

Research into the history of both alchemy and medicine depends on a grasp of a whole gamut of disciplines, from knowledge of languages, including Arabic, Latin and Greek, to an understanding of shifting culture and politics, theology, literature and art. Some basic chemistry also helps. To get a feel for the practices described in their sources, researchers have recently been recreating some of the recipes and techniques described in contemporary documents.

Manuscript collections at the British Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the ̽��ֱ�� Library in Cambridge contain many hundreds of alchemical and medical recipes, which modern scholars can attempt to decode. To learn more about a medicinal elixir called the “vegetable stone,” Dr Rampling is attempting to follow the 15th-century process in a modern lab.

“One of the biggest challenges for alchemists and their patrons was working out which ingredients to start with,” she said. “ ̽��ֱ��‘vegetable stone’ seems to have begun as a recipe using lead compounds, but sometimes practitioners interpreted ‘lead’ as a codename for something else, which they then tested. Sometimes, a completely new process might result.”

A workshop run in conjunction with the conference will give a group of graduate students and early career researchers the chance to emulate the alchemists by honing both their textual and practical skills. They will examine some of Isaac Newton’s own alchemical notebooks, including his ‘Index chemicus’ of chemical substances, now held by King’s College Library. A session held at the Department of Chemistry will then allow the researchers to try their hand at recreating some early electrochemical experiments, guided by Hasok Chang, Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge.

“Sometimes you need to know what reactions look like in order to understand early chemical texts, and to appreciate the problems faced by early modern experimenters. So lab work is sometimes as much about history as it is about science,” said Dr Rampling. “We hope that the combination of hands-on sessions and the range of presentations will help researchers make connections between their own work and that being done in other fields. Maybe we can stimulate a bit of intellectual chemistry of our own!”

̽��ֱ��conference Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment takes place at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge 22-24 September. A postgraduate workshop in the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will take place on 21 September. ̽��ֱ��conference is sponsored and adminstered by CRASSH. ̽��ֱ��organisers are Dr Jenny Rampling, Peter Jones and Lauren Kassell.

An international conference taking place at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� later this week will reveal that for many centuries alchemy and medicine were deeply intertwined - both in theory and practice.

Strict boundaries between alchemy and what we now call ‘chemistry’, ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ did not exist in early modern Europe.

Dr Jenny Rampling

Keynes Collection, King's College Library

Isaac Newton's Index Chemicus

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Dragonsblood: the alchemy of paint

bjb42 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dragonsblood – a red pigment prized for the best part of two millennia and discussed by apothecaries, alchemists and painters alike – was said to be the mixed, coagulated blood of dragons and elephants collected from the place where the beasts fought and died together. Actually, it was a tree resin, and a sample of the pigment can be found today in Queens’ College, in a medicine cabinet assembled in 1702 by Giovanni Francesco Vigani, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s first Professor of Chemistry. Dragonsblood also features inThe Alchemy of Paint, a book about the colours used by medieval artists. It is a book that attempts to understand medieval artists’ materials as they were perceived by the people who used them. But it was inspired by a very practical modern problem.

Conserving the lost Retable

I work as a scientist in the ̽��ֱ��’s Hamilton Kerr Institute, a department of ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum that specialises in the conservation and restoration of paintings. In 1994, the Institute received the Thornham Parva Retable, a 12ft-long altarpiece painted in the 14th century for a Dominican Priory in Thetford, Norfolk, by artists from Norwich. It had survived destruction in Henry Vlll’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century but was lost until 1927, when it was discovered in a stable loft. By this time, the original 1330s paint was almost entirely covered with paint applied in the 1770s, which had to be removed in order to conserve the medieval material.

̽��ֱ��Institute’s treatment of the Retable was the focus of considerable scrutiny because it is the largest, best-preserved and second oldest altarpiece in the UK. A 22-strong committee of academics, funding bodies and parishioners discussed how to proceed. Over the course of two years, during which microscopic paint samples were analysed by electron microscopy, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, a consensus gradually came together and the conservation work began.

Cultural contexts, recipes and alchemists

̽��ֱ��suggested treatment strategy was accepted, in large part, because it was based on scientific evidence. As a conservation scientist, from these analyses I understood the consequence of the artists’ materials in terms of their physical and chemical properties, their interaction with the environment and their behaviour when undergoing conservation treatment. But I began to wonder about the medieval artists themselves: how would they have explained the materials and methods involved in making an altarpiece? Were they influenced by their Dominican patrons or indeed by the closeness of Cambridge’s intellectual orbit, both well known in the 14th century for their interest in science?

Looking for clues, I consulted artists’ treatises detailing medieval recipes for pigments and paints, such as the manuals written by Theophilus Presbyter, a 12th-century Benedictine monk, and Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, physician to Charles I and friend of the artist van Dyck. But connecting the physical evidence offered by paintings to the artists’ recipes, which often verged on the bizarre and magical, was not always straightforward. ̽��ֱ��legendary origin of dragonsblood is a case in point. Why would artists say that this derived from dragons and elephants fighting to the death when they knew dragonsblood was really a tree resin? Other medieval recipes were just as evocative: a stone from the doorstep of Paradise and a metal won by one-eyed horsemen from ferocious griffins near the North Pole. ̽��ֱ��recipe books certainly didn’t make sense according to the science that I knew. I needed to brush up on the science with which the artists were familiar: alchemy.

Cloak-and-dagger

̽��ֱ��medieval palette owed much to what some have described as ‘cloak-and-dagger science’, conducted by artists employing secret recipes to create the luxurious colours we are familiar with today. This was the era of alchemy, best known for the quest of alchemists to turn base metals into gold and to find the elixir of eternal life, when scientists like the Dominican Albertus Magnus wrote on the subject. Researching their writings provided me with the necessary technical background to begin the challenge of connecting the physical evidence offered by the scientific analysis of paintings and the recipes in artists’ treatises. ̽��ֱ��Alchemy of Paint is the fruit of that challenge.

Colours, it seems, were read differently in the mindset of medieval Europe. Not only in how people responded to them – ‘scarlet’ today describes a colour, but it was originally a type of cloth – but also in how artists considered their materials. Their ideas, fed by the philosophers and scientists of the time, would probably not be too out of place in the ̽��ֱ��’s 1209 syllabus 800 years ago. Today, an awareness of their ideas helps ensure that conservation of art is undertaken with cultural sensitivity and also immeasurably enhances our appreciation of their art.

Walking the dog

Attempting to join up artists’ theory and practice has been a lot of fun. Walking my dog around Cambridgeshire, across fields and over the nearest things to hills that the region has to offer, I saw the sun set and the stars come out, the seasons come and go, and the colours change. I attempted to familiarise myself with what CS Lewis calledThe Discarded Image, the poetic way that the medieval world view synthesised ‘the whole organisation of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe’. In the medieval world, everything had meaning, even the pigments they painted with. Guidance from the ‘discarded image’ helped me to consider artists’ materials and methods in ways that modern science could not.

̽��ֱ��Alchemy of Paint was a response to a very practical situation: the desire for a broader and deeper view of the Thornham Parva Retable, as well as the Westminster Retable, treated between 1998 and 2005 at the Institute, and the Macclesfield Psalter acquired by ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum in 2005. I was lucky enough to be by the bus-stop, as it were, when three medieval masterpieces came along together. It was an enormous privilege to get to know them and they all informed the thinking behindThe Alchemy of Paint. And I certainly hope that the book will have a practical effect – to encourage students and researchers to engage more profoundly with the products of other cultures.

And the Thornham Parva Retable? It finally returned home in 2003, its treatment hailed as a great success by parishioners, funding bodies and the academic community alike. It even won an award.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Spike Bucklow at the Hamilton Kerr Institute.

Through his exploration of the science of art, the recipes of medieval artists and the writings of alchemists, art conservation scientist Spike Bucklow sets out to disentangle the alchemy of medieval paint.

I began to wonder about the medieval artists themselves: how would they have explained the materials and methods involved in making an altarpiece?

Spike Bucklow

Dean and Chapter, Westminster Abbey

Detail from Westminster Retable

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