"Our display included the first edition of the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (AlcC52AS.EL), a compendium of alchemical literature. Editor Elias Ashmole envisions John Gower as a skilled user of the craft. In fact, he claims that Gower was Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Master in this Science,” training him in alchemy during their friendship. Excerpted in this book is a passage from Gower’s Confessio amantis, which Ashmole claims to prove Gower “fully understood the Secret, for he gives you a faithfull account… and affirmes the Art to be true.”

https://special-collections.wp.st-andrew...r-society/

   

John Gower shooting the world, a sphere of earth, air, and water (from a manuscript of his works ca. 1400). The text reads:

Ad mundum mitto mea iacula dumque sagitto
At ubi iustus erit nulla sagitta ferit
Sed male viventes hos vulnero transgredientes
Conscius ergo sibi se speculetur ibi

"In the Art Institute’s “Science Fictions” exhibition, Varo’s work casts the traditionally male alchemist as female in “Ciencia inútil, o El Alquimista” (“Useless Science, or The Alchemist”), her lone figure distilling a cloud of vapor on a checkerboard floor that twists into her cloak. A clue to the alchemist’s experimentations lies within the piece’s color palette, as the exhibition’s catalog points out: Black, white, yellow and red reference the four-staged chemical reaction fabled to take place in creating the immortality-granting elixir of life."

https://edition.cnn.com/style/remedios-v...index.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNZ41SrHrt4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRtiLJT1feg



   

https://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de...y=alchemie

By Theresa Levitt.

"In 1770 a new perfume shop opened in the centre of Paris on the rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, a fragrant oasis adjoining a district that was, according to one contemporary, ‘by far the worst-smelling place in the world’. This stretch of the Right Bank was home to an abattoir, a fish market, a butcher, an overcrowded prison and a mortuary, whose combined effluvia flowed through open sewers directly into the Seine. Blaise Laugier’s new store in a side street off the open market of Les Halles, sandwiched between a florist and a seller of scented fans, took its place among a cluster of fashionable boutiques catering to an expanding metropolitan class for whom perfume had become an essential part of daily life."

Reviewed here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n15/...mist-s-den

Translation of Alexandru Pop's short book on the Emerald Tablet in which he deploys his own interpretative system:

https://www.academia.edu/105416083/The_E...xandru_Pop


   

"Science history students at Columbia University don’t have to imagine what it was like to be an alchemist. If they take one of historian Pamela Smith’s courses, they can spend a semester reading medieval alchemical manuscripts describing recipes for making emeralds or turning silkworms into gold. Then they re-create the experiments in a lab."


https://www.ttbook.org/interview/histori...al-recipes

https://symbolsage.com/alchemy-symbols-a...-meanings/


plus link to 4th edition of Wheeler's book of Alchemical Symbols, now on Kindle Unlimited.

At the Beinecke.

"Manuscript on paper, composed in three parts, of a large number of practical procedures, chiefly alchemical but sometimes medical, with a few standard medieval alchemical texts by Khalid ibn Yazid, Theodoric, and Albertus Magnus. Occasionally there are passages in cipher, added by Martin Roesel of Rosenthal ca. 1586, long after the principal contents were written; the cipher seems to be of a simple number-substitution type."

https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2056670

At the Beinecke.

"Manuscript on paper of a pietistic, mystical text in prose and verse, illustrated by a great variety of illustrations cut from manuscripts of smaller dimensions (plus some prints), and pasted in. These illustrations include the "Python" illuminated drawing which has been reproduced in color, a series of "alchemical processes depicted symbolically taking place within flasks", as well as many other pictorial elements drawn from a variety of sources."

https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/32366759

"Critical edition with introduction, translation and notes by Sylvain Matton

Appointed Inquisitor General of the Crown of Aragon in 1357, famous for his huge Directorium Inquisitorum (1376), which was to become the procedural handbook for the Spanish Inquisition until the seven­teenth century, the Dominican friar Nicholas Eymerich (ca. 1317-1399) stood out for his diligence, his severity and his inflexibility in the exercise of his office. But his eagerness and relentlessness to hunt down all those he dee­med heretical, especially the Fraticelli, Beguards and Lullists, so angered King John I of Aragon that in April 1393 he was sentenced to exile. Yet this did not dampen his zeal, which he directed towards writing. Indeed, having found refuge at the papal court in Avignon, he wrote there in 1395 and 1396 Against Ignorant Astrologers and Against Nigromancers Who Wrongly Judge of Hidden Things and Against Alchemists, two treatises which are his ulti­ma verba on the subject, and in which he endeavours to demonstrate that both astrology and divinatory arts as well as alchemy savour of heresy because they are grounded or fatally end in a covenant with the devil, and therefore fall under the inquisitorial jurisdiction."


https://www.fabula.org/actualites/113283...mists.html