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Thesis ID: CBB322966699

Transmutation in a Golden Age: Reading Alchemy in Late Medieval and Early Modem Cracow (2016)

Rec, Agnieszka (Author)
Freedman, Paul H. (Advisor)

Yale University
Freedman, Paul H.

URI: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1923440747?accountid=12964

Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 203 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Manuscripts Books Transmutation (alchemy) Alchemy Renaissance Early modern Poland

This dissertation uses the "biography" of Jagiellonian University BJ 5465, an alchemical manuscript compiled in Cracow at the end of the Middle Ages and annotated heavily in subsequent centuries. The manuscript is a composite of six fifteenth-century booklets containing alchemical texts and recipes in Latin, German, Italian, and Polish. Addressing questions at the intersection of the history of science and the history of the book, I show how the volume was shaped by the milieu of its production, bearing marks of the international intellectual flourishing then happening in the Polish royal city. I further explain how later annotations bear witness to a far richer tradition of alchemical practice in and around Cracow than previously understood. Major themes include the nature of manuscript miscellanies; the place of alchemy at universities; and the place of Cracow in the European "economy of secrets." In keeping with the notion of a biography of the book, Chapter 1 discusses the context of the manuscript's "birth." It uses the booklets that make up BJ 5465 to introduce the intellectual and economic life of Cracow at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly the book trade and the university, which was then in an exceptionally rich period of scientific development. (Cracow counted Copernicus among its students.) The current state of research on the early history of alchemy in Cracow, beginning in the fourteenth century, is reviewed. Chapter 2 moves to the "childhood" of BJ5465 at the university of Cracow. I show that there was a much larger community of practitioners than previously acknowledged, and furthermore that that community can answer outstanding questions in the history of alchemy and the history of science that cannot be (or have not been) answered from sources originating on the western end of the continent. Members of that community are identified and include a number of doctors, professors, and students, including Adam of Bochyn, a master's student who authored the earliest surviving alchemical text from this community. BJ5465 was annotated heavily in its "adulthood." Chapter 3 considers how the manuscript was used and read after compilation through a case study of Jan Achacy Kmita, a poet and administrator of a salt mine southeast of Cracow. Salt revenues had underpinned the Polish royal budget for centuries, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century one of those mines was on the verge of failing. In that context, Kmita turned to medieval alchemical theories as one of a series of solutions to his own economic problems. In particular, he used his identity as an alchemist, alongside his literary connections, in an attempt to woo a patron. Kmita annotated the manuscript heavily. It is from these notes that we can recover his reading and alchemical practices which help us to understand what it meant to read and annotate a scientific book in the period. Appendices constitute a substantial portion of the dissertation. Appendix 1 presents an edition and translation of Adam of Bochyn's Fundamentum scienciae nobilissimae secretorum naturae. Appendix 2 provides a description of BJ 5465, followed by a list of recipes and a table of foliations. Methodologically, this dissertation brings together the history of alchemy and the history of the book. It demonstrates how the life of a manuscript studied alongside its codicological development can extend our understanding of a scientific community far beyond what is available through more direct textual evidence. Most immediately this allows for a detailed reconstruction of the alchemical community in and around Cracow at the end of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Cracow thus serves as a test case to address questions in the history of science about the place of alchemy at universities, circulation of scientific information, and the persistence of medieval ideas into the early modern period, questions that are answerable only with the inclusion in the scholarship of geographical areas often and inaccurately considered to be on the "fringes" of Europe.

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