This session investigates how early modern European courts influenced, and were influenced by, controversies over natural knowledge, taking alchemy as its exemplar. Alchemy was always a politically-inflected science, whose practitioners promised to both preserve and enrich the person of the prince by supplying cheap bullion and powerful medicines. Despite this potential, the intricacy and obscurity of its methods, and the bad reputation of many of its practitioners, meant that investing in alchemy was often a gamble for princes and their ministers. How, then, did patrons and practitioners negotiate the tension between optimism and suspicion, in order to produce useful knowledge and valuable goods?
Our three papers seek to answer this question by unpacking the political and economic implications of alchemy and related arts across diverse courtly settings: late medieval and Tudor England, sixteenth-century Germany, and eighteenth-century France. Each context generated its own concerns. English monarchs worried about alchemy’s associations with magic, German princes were alarmed by allegations of poisoning, and French academicians sought to associate transmutation with fraud. In the face of such concerns, practitioners also took risks, as they struggled to market their techniques, win financial security, and avoid the worst pitfalls of courtly life—including the machinations of rivals competing for favor and resources.
