Rampling, Jennifer M. (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 29, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 19-34
Edition Details: Title of volume: “Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World”
Language: English
An influential strand of English alchemy was the pursuit of the “vegetable stone,” a medicinal elixir popularized by George Ripley (d. ca. 1490), made from a metallic substance, “sericon.” Yet the identity of sericon was not fixed, undergoing radical reinterpretation between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as Ripley's lead-based practice was eclipsed by new methods, notably the antimonial approach of George Starkey (1628--65). Tracing “sericonian” alchemy over 250 years, I show how alchemists fed their practical findings back into textual accounts, creating a “feedback loop” in which the authority of past adepts was maintained by exegetical manipulations---a process that I term “practical exegesis.”
...MoreArticle Eddy, Matthew Daniel; Mauskopf, Seymour H.; Newman, William R. (2014) An Introduction to Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-15).
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