Article ID: CBB585369113

'Learn to Restrain Your Mouth': Alchemical Rumours and their Historiographical Afterlives (2020)

unapi

From around 1700 onwards, a number of sensationalist claims regarding adepts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to appear in alchemical literature. They eventually made their way into standard works of historiography and continue to be repeated as factual. Yet the source for these rumours, a poem attributed to Martinus de Delle, supposedly a chamberlain of Emperor Rudolf II, has largely escaped scrutiny. The only surviving manuscript version currently known is here edited and translated in full for the first time. In the introductory essay, we call into question the existence of De Delle. Through scrutiny of the portrayals of alchemists within the poem, we propose that the author may have been an assayer in Prague. We then draw attention to the roles and effects of rumours within both the history and historiography of alchemy and argue for the importance of taking alchemical gossip seriously.

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Authors & Contributors
Fabiana Lopes da Silveira
Green, Elspeth
Anderson, Penelope
Laetitia Rimpau
Shaw, Lytle
Charlwood, Catherine
Concepts
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Literary analysis
Alchemy
Science and culture
Modernism
Time Periods
Early modern
18th century
Modern
19th century
Renaissance
Medieval
Places
United States
Great Britain
England
Germany
Europe
Prague (Czechia)
Institutions
Lichfield Botanical Society
Académie Royale des Sciences (France)
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