Introduction

      Producing the elixir of life was one of two major aims of medieval alchemists. Metallurgical alchemy, the transmutation of base metals, usually into gold or silver, was the other. Often discussed as a pseudoscience, alchemy in fact played a significant part in the genealogy of modern chemistry. It dealt, above all, with matter—its manipulation, improvement, and general properties. Sometimes limited to techniques that would be known to dyers, metal workers, and other artisans, in its most elaborated form alchemy was a scientia that explained the composition of the physical universe. Alchemy was tied quite closely to other disciplines of natural philosophy, including physics, astrology, and medicine. Yet in spite of its putative ability to explain the composition of material things, alchemy, unlike its sister disciplines, never gained a lasting foothold in the schools.

      Perhaps because of this development, alchemy was not standardized. There was no single definition, nor a general curriculum. There were influential works, but as a practice outside or at the fringe of the university, medieval alchemy was idiosyncratic. Unlike, for instance, the study of theology or academic medicine, where students were expected to annotate specific texts with their master’s commentary, the decision to write about or practice alchemy was very much an expression of individual preference and circumstance. Therefore, it was not just detractors who argued with adherents over definitions of alchemy and its place within the fields of medieval scientiae and, more broadly, its proper role in Christendom. Adherents as well seldom agreed with one another on these questions. This is not without advantage to the historian, however. Alchemy’s marginality refracts, rather than reflects, normative intellectual life. It provides us a better perspective through which to understand the intellectual culture of the era, precisely because alchemical literature resists essentialization and generalization. This disunity of the literature was apparent enough that by the later Middle Ages, alchemical schools such as the Pseudo-Lullian recognized the messy reality of prior generations and sought to solve the problem through interpolations and elisions in the manuscript tradition.

      Discord, however, required some common ground on which alchemical ideas could be debated. Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the practitioners and theoreticians of alchemy organized their discipline on then contemporary and widely accepted principles of natural philosophy.¹ Unlike philosophy, however, the theorization of alchemy often included a type of empirical practice. Medieval adherents of alchemy relied on observations and tests called experimenta (or sometimes documenta).² Robert Bartlett suggests that we might best translate terms like experimenta and experientia to mean observations, rather than experiments, in order to avoid confusion with the modern terminology. Still, what is important is that alchemists took into consideration the results of their practice, or the practice of others, rather than relying exclusively on argumentum (reasoning).³ This is not the same as saying that the sort of philosophical reasoning common to medieval philosophy was a subsidiary concern to physical trials. It is better to say that alchemical discourse, like natural philosophy, was founded on both reasoned argument and established opinion, but could—and did—account for alchemical praxis to inform its philosophical conclusions. Therefore, like chirurgery and empirical medicine, alchemy occupied space between the “liberal and manual arts” and consequently was held in less esteem than many of its sister disciplines.⁴

      Latin commentators of the era—be they translators, practitioners, or skeptics—often referred to alchemy as a novitas (a novelty), a term that could connote disdain, but also signaled to the intellectual community the opening of a new scholarly question and endeavor.⁵ While it is true that some of the techniques and processes that made up the alchemical craft were known in the West well before the twelfth century, alchemy as a distinct branch of knowledge was no longer differentiated as such in the Latin West after the upheavals of late antiquity. It reemerged