In seventeenth-century Europe the practice of curating specific alchemical texts in order to create a comprehensive body of work increased rapidly owing to the technology of the printing press and the belief that these types of tract were most successful when used in tandem. Evidence of readership practices, scribal and print culture, and prefatory publication material all point to the active speculation of alchemical texts in a new and intentional manner during this century. The most widely collected and well known of this genre, Theatrum Chemicum, was printed in three editions from the years 1602 to 1661.
This talk will examine material evidence of the speculative nature of this phenomenon. Chymical collections show fascinating examples of readers working through hermetically disguised alchemical concepts by drawing, annotating, cross referencing, and otherwise altering the pages of the texts. However, readers were not the only editors of these tracts. Authors, printers, and publishers also had agency in the way their alchemical collections were used. In the case of these texts, what is lacking was sometimes as intentional as what was printed.
More broadly, chymical collections reflect cultural and intellectual issues brought on by the advent of print in the seventeenth century. The anxiety surrounding vernacularization, or vulgarization, of alchemical texts is illustrated by the relationship between English translator Elias Ashmole and the author of the Latin Fasciculus Chemicus, Arthur Dee. Ashmole directly addresses the controversy of making hermetically guarded secrets accessible in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an English response to the continental Theatrum Chemicum.
