Jennifer Rampling on Renaissance Alchemy

An expert on Renaissance alchemy tells us how this art related to philosophy at the time... and how she has tried to reproduce its results!

Transcript: History of Philosophy 437, Jennifer Rampling on Renaissance Alchemy

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

Peter Adamson: Maybe we can start with a question about what people actually believed about alchemy in this period. In a previous episode, I suggested when discussing magic, that most people in England in say the 15th, 16th century would have assumed that magic was possible and actually even frequently in use, even if they were skeptical about whether they could prove that magic had been used in like one particular case. Is that also true for alchemy or was that something that people were more skeptical about or did people not actually generally have a view about it because it was too technical and elite?

Jennifer Rampling: Well, the 16th century is a really interesting period for English alchemy because what had previously not been so widely known really starts to become the subject of conversation. And this is partly because during the 16th century, alchemy became an art that was receiving royal patronage. And once princes are interested in investing in something, everybody pays attention, especially if they're also interested in pursuing that as a source of funding on their own account. So alchemy really enters Europe, by which I mean Latin Europe, in the 12th century in the form of translations from the Arabic and would initially have circulated among more of a scholarly audience. However, by the 14th, 15th century, it's been extremely widely practiced, which is to say it's no longer just viewed as a literate subject. It's something that people at almost any level of society could take an interest in. Now, what really changes round about the second half of the 16th century is the sheer level of interest that alchemy is garnering among English elites. So the Queen herself, Elizabeth I, actually sponsored some alchemical projects. It's hard to tell how interested Elizabeth was personally in alchemy, but her chief minister, William Cecil, was certainly personally interested in alchemy, which is interesting because alchemy had different outputs. We tend to know about alchemy now best as a science that was aimed at turning imperfect substances into perfect ones, especially to the archetype of changing lead into gold and silver. So as a source of bullion, alchemy was certainly of interest to the state. Cecil also had poor health and was quite interested in the medicinal applications of alchemy as well. So you can see alchemy being pursued as this potential source of both cheap bullion and efficacious medicines, which means that even people who were skeptical were interested.

Peter Adamson: Because like, who knows, what if it worked? Then we're going to be able to turn lead into gold. I mean, even if the chances are one percent, if it came off, then suddenly you'd have unlimited wealth for your kingdom.

Jennifer Rampling: Exactly. What if it worked? And there is always somebody who can report on a successful case. Now, sometimes those cases are reported in much earlier texts. So you have medieval sources which describe the successful pursuit of alchemy. But there were also contemporary reports as well. So some of the projects that actually were funded by the English Crown at some point or another would have produced early assays that look quite promising and which then attracted investments. Of course, none of those stories really ended up very happily, for a practitioner or their investors.

Peter Adamson: Actually, now that you're saying that, it strikes me that there's a parallel to voyages to the so-called New World, right? Because they were trying to get gold, the same thing, and they were investing in it. And maybe they didn't think that there was a huge chance of success. But again, if it was successful, then the rewards would be immense. And so it was worth giving it a shot. So it's like Frobisher's journey, for example.

Jennifer Rampling: Well, that's a great parallel, because actually one of the finds of Frobisher's journey was this mysterious black rock, which in a sample made its way back to England. And then through a series of accidents, it was discovered that on heating, this black rock yielded something that might have been gold, with the result that the ship went back and then brought back tons of the stuff, which later turned out to be useless. But you can really see in that enterprise a blending of the exploratory enterprise and the alchemical enterprise.

Peter Adamson: Something that might surprise listeners, and it's kind of surprising me, actually, as we talk about this, is that we maybe think of alchemy as akin to magic, as I already mentioned. And magic was being stringently controlled and outlawed. But now you're saying that the crown is literally investing in alchemical experimentation. Does that mean that alchemy is just sort of legal across the board and anyone can do it, or there are tight restrictions on it?

Jennifer Rampling: Alchemy was not legal. It had been made a felony, actually, in the early 15th century. And the reason for that was concern about debasing the bullion that went into the coinage. So you can imagine the situation. The mint buying gold and silver in order to have it coined, and somebody sells some metal to the mint, which is not pure gold or pure silver, and then that enters into the coinage and you end up debasing the entire currency. So the potentially catastrophic outcomes, if you assume alchemy doesn't work, it just produces a kind of false debased metal. So the practice that was called multiplication, because it's the idea that you'll take a little bit of gold and silver and then you'll artificially multiply it by alloying it with different metals, that was made a felony under Henry IV. So people are practicing alchemy right through the 15th and 16th century, but in principle, they can only do so legally if they receive a license from the sovereign. And this is one reason why monarchs like Elizabeth I received so many applications from practitioners requesting formal permission to practice. Of course, they're then in a slightly difficult position because the question arises, well, how are you so good at it if you haven't been practicing? And they have to try and work around that in their suits by saying that, you know, they got up to a certain point and then they stopped because they didn't want to risk overstepping.

Peter Adamson: So the rule is you're allowed to do it, but only if the Queen explicitly allows you to do it. And I guess that these applications are a very valuable source of historical information for us who want to understand how prevalent alchemy was, what people thought about it and the chances of its success.

Jennifer Rampling: Absolutely. It's incredible to find these sources in the archives sometimes. They're letters which were addressed to either Elizabeth I directly or to William Cecil. Of course, the fact that they were written, it doesn't follow that they were actually received or read by those audiences. But nonetheless, the fact that practitioners actually felt alchemical knowledge gave them sufficient grounds to bypass the traditional patronage hierarchy and go straight to the top. That's quite remarkable.

Peter Adamson: Actually, can I ask you something? Because I think it's philosophically relevant. When you say that they had this awkward problem of having to present themselves as understanding how this would work, but not actually having done it yet because they didn't have permission, did they ever frame that by saying, well, I understand the theory of alchemy, I just haven't put it to practice in a laboratory? Or is it more like I've done some experiments at a practical level, but I haven't done anything yet that would count as alchemy proper that would be outlawed? Do you see what I mean?

Jennifer Rampling: Yes. So they usually present themselves as philosophers. That's the term that they use. You'll never find a practitioner who's applying for a license calling himself, because it's usually a guy, an alchemist. They call themselves philosophers. And they do that to draw attention to this lineage of practitioners who are also people with a philosophical knowledge to which they belong. And existing within that lineage of philosophers gives them a kind of authority because they're able to claim that they understand how to read the books written by these philosophers. And that's an important point, because so many alchemical texts are written in a way that's extremely obscure. And that's often quite deliberate. So the idea is that you write a book explaining the secrets of alchemy, but you do so in such a way that only the very wise or those who already have a certain amount of knowledge will be able to follow what's happening. One way in which you might try to appeal to the sovereign is to say that you already know how to read the books of the philosophers. You've cracked the code. You know the practice. What they have achieved in practice, you will also be able to achieve because you understand their words correctly. So in a way, success in practice is partly success in reading.

Peter Adamson: That makes it sound like it's kind of a humanist project. So there's these texts that are available that have maybe come through the medieval tradition or that go all the way back to antiquity. And these people, just as Erasmus is saying that he can sit with the manuscripts of the New Testament and come up with a better edition. So these people are in a way tackling an even more radical challenge, which is to study these completely obscure, deliberately obscure texts and kind of crack the code and understand what they mean. Is that a good comparison, do you think?

Jennifer Rampling: So in a sense, that's exactly what's happening. But it's not just an early modern humanist enterprise. It's also a medieval exegetical enterprise. So throughout the Middle Ages and into the 1600s, you see readers of alchemical texts bringing various kinds of reading strategy to bear on their sources. In the 14th or 15th century, you'll see readers examining alchemical text the same way that they might study a work of scripture, trying to read it on multiple levels. So there's the literal sense, which you can usually discard in alchemy, but there's also the allegorical sense. So you have to try to understand what the authority is really talking about when he uses terms like "the green lion" or "the marriage of the sun and the moon," what's being indicated here. And I'll come back to that in a moment, because that raises a whole set of problems. With humanism, you have a new set of philological techniques being brought to bear. And it's interesting that this coincides with the period during the 16th century when alchemical writings first start getting printed as well. So you then have a concern about whether you're even printing the best version of the text. And one reason that alchemical readers were quite concerned about getting the meaning right is that in alchemy, because so many code names, or as often called "decknamen" and cover names, are used, how do you know that you've got it right? But if you have a corrupt manuscript, you might damage what's already a very precarious text. And if the text isn't reliable, your practice won't be reliable either.

Peter Adamson: There's a parallel there, I think, to what happens in some of the other sciences and in mathematics, where you have, for example, manuscripts with diagrams that just have letters on certain points of the diagram, where you have like, this is something I mentioned while I was talking about Harriet, that he's writing out by hand whole pages of mathematical calculations. And then you try to imagine getting a printer to publish that without any mistakes. It's almost inconceivable. Right. And if you're trying to edit a text like that, it's really hard.

Jennifer Rampling: That's right. And you can find all kinds of transcription errors which have practical consequences in alchemical writing. So to give you an example, a very common ingredient is vitriol. So vitriols are what we now call metal sulfates, copper sulfate, iron sulfate. But the Latin word vitriolum is sometimes abbreviated in manuscripts. So it looks like vitrum or glass. Now, if you use glass, you're going to get a very different result using iron sulfate. So you need to get the text right. And you mentioned diagrams as well. Some alchemical manuscripts are also illustrated. And sometimes the illustrations are quite difficult to copy. So not all alchemical copyists have equal skills at draftsmanship. So sometimes the pictures too will change form in a way that can alter their meaning. So one interesting outcome of all of these problems, the difficulty of reading the text, the problem of copying the text, the problem of trying to preserve images from earlier manuscripts, is that sometimes meaning can change. And sometimes it changes in a way that you don't actually notice because the practice might still work. I haven't said much about practice yet, but you have to keep in mind that these texts aren't just being read for intellectual interest. They're being translated into practices that people can actually carry out. And the idea is that if these practices work, then you're going to be able to achieve the same aims as these ancient philosophers, these alchemical philosophers. So let's say the text uses a term, and this is one that I've written about, like Sericon, to refer to the prime method. Well, what is Sericon? If you read enough alchemical material, you might get the sense that it's some kind of metallic body. So there's an alchemist writing in the late 15th century called George Ripley, who describes a product called a vegetable stone, which you can use for medicine, but it will also transmute metals into gold. The only problem is you need to know what Sericon is because that's the main ingredient. Now, Ripley probably had in mind some kind of combination of lead and copper compounds, because we know it's something that dissolved in distilled vinegar to make what we would now call sugar of lead. The problem is, because it's not explicit, you could easily substitute another ingredient in for Sericon. So we have cases of readers all through the 16th century trying to interpret Sericon as different things. And one of the most popular readings was antimony. So John Dee, who studied George Ripley's writings very closely, seems to have assumed that Ripley was talking about antimony, or to be precise, an aura of antimony called stibnite. And so he adapts that process in his own writing, the irony being that if you do some chemistry with antimony, you also get really interesting results. So you would have no reason to ever question the reliability of your medieval source.

Peter Adamson: Would it be fair, then, to say that they're kind of always going back and forth between an empirical practice and a textual practice? They're reading these texts by Ripley, by Islamic authors, maybe something they think goes all the way back to antiquity. Also, on the one hand, it's a literary culture, but on the other hand, they're actually in a laboratory trying things out. And as you're suggesting, if they try something and it doesn't work, they might think, oh, I must have the text wrong.

Jennifer Rampling: I think that's exactly right. Yes, you can see it as a kind of feedback loop. So you have the text in front of you, you think you've cracked it, you carry it out in your workshop, doesn't quite get the results that you were expecting. So you go back to the text and you perhaps reinterpret a term. And now you get something that you think is interesting, which may or may not be what the text was originally describing, but the chemistry is interesting, it gets you a practical result. And so when you then write up what you've done, perhaps in a patronage suit or perhaps composing your own treatise, you then substitute your own reading. And that's one way in which we can see how the chemistry changes over time, even as the texts remain fairly consistent.

Peter Adamson: It seems like that would already be one reason to say that this isn't a purely empirical or experimental science in the sense that we might associate with the Enlightenment science of the 17th century and so on. But am I being too quick there to say, oh, well, like this is more like a humanist attempt to engage with text than an empirical science? In what sense is it empirical what they're doing?

Jennifer Rampling: I think it's a highly empirical art in that alchemists are always trying to make something. Now, you do have a continuum. So at one end, you have what we might term the armchair alchemist. So that's somebody who might not be personally engaged in practice, but they enjoy reading the text, perhaps as a kind of intellectual puzzle. And it's clear that some of the more literary alchemical texts were read in this way, as you can tell from the way that readers annotated the books. So it's almost a kind of problem solving exercise. But even then, it's grounded in ideas about how substances actually interact. So you can't posit a chemical operation that doesn't work in practice. Then at the other end of the continuum, you have practitioners who really are very focused on the practice. They may come from more of a craft background, for instance, rather than a scholarly background. We have accounts of alchemical practitioners in England come from a sort of mining and metallurgical background or who quite often are working in the cloth trade, which actually makes a certain amount of sense, because if you work in, let's say, dyeing cloth, you already have an idea about how to colour substances, how different chemicals will produce colouring effects or they'll work as mordants. So it might give you an insight into practices which you can then carry over to alchemical questions.

Peter Adamson: ItYeah, something I've sometimes seen in the Islamic alchemical tradition that they don't necessarily promise to turn one thing into a turn something like lead into gold. But they'll say, here's how you give a metal a golden tincture, right, which is a lot like dyeing the metal another colour.

Jennifer Rampling: And you've just pointed to another kind of continuum, which is between what we might think of as pure alchemy or the actual substantial transmutation of a base metal like lead into gold. So it's the real thing. What you have coming out at the end is pure gold, which will stand any assay, to a huge variety of more particular applications where the aim isn't actual transmutation. It's just to make something that's a good enough imitation that you could use it for vessels, for ornaments, for jewellery. And actually, in 16th century recipe books, you find a huge number of the latter kind of recipes. So dozens and dozens of recipes for what's called citronation, which is really taking a white metal like silver and turning it yellow so that it looks like gold. And nobody will have thought that that was transmutation. But nonetheless, it exists on a kind of continuum with the more substantial change that the alchemical philosophers promised. Of course, the alchemists would probably argue that the latter isn't really philosophical in the same way that transmutation is philosophical, because that requires a radical change of matter.

Peter Adamson: ItIt's really important to them that they are, in fact, manipulating underlying natures in material bodies. It's actually a lot like what we see in magic, where you have natural magic, which is manipulating occult powers that God created in bodies, as opposed to, say, invoking the power of Satan in order to engage in a demonological ritual or something like that. So I guess in alchemy, there's a similar phenomenon where they talk about natural alchemy and something more like black or magical alchemy. Is that right?

Jennifer Rampling: Well, that's an interesting question. So the answer is not exactly, because, as you just said, magic itself can be natural or you can have ritual magic that involves summoning entities like demons or angels. But you don't necessarily see the same distinction in alchemy. Alchemy is always thought to be natural in its causes. Now, whether it's also natural or magical is another matter. So some alchemists would probably dispute that there was anything magical about that practice at all. Others might see a continuum between their alchemical practice and natural magical ideas. So it can actually be very difficult to distinguish between natural magic and some alchemical theories. And I'll give you an example. So Marsilio Ficino, when he talks about the spiritus mundi in his Platonizing works, posited some kind of immaterial connected tissue that links together different substances. Now, there was a 14th century writer on alchemy, John of Rupescissa, who was interested in the distillation of wine to produce a solvent, which he called the quintessence. And you see this interesting fusion in the late 15th, early 16th century between ideas of the quintessence and Ficino's idea of the spiritus mundi. So in a way, the spiritus mundi becomes a vehicle for transporting an alchemical idea, the quintessence, into a philosophical conversation or vice versa. It's a way of neoplatonizing a conversation that's really based on medieval alchemy. You could argue that if you were doing alchemy in that kind of mold, because Ficino's idea was really developed by Cornelius Agrippa, the great writer on magic. If you were reading Agrippa for other reasons, you might pick up some alchemical ideas from that, and you may not necessarily see a clear distinction between them. One thing that's very interesting, though, is that, and you alluded to this earlier when you mentioned the fact that the Tudor monarchs were really not at all keen on conjuring practices, but they did seem to allow alchemical practices in some circumstances. A number of practicing alchemists were arrested for conjuring. So they were accused of performing ritual magic, and they actually used their alchemical expertise as a way of trying to get off the hook. So we actually have a couple of petitions that survive from alchemists who were imprisoned, who essentially argue that they weren't really practicing magic. What they were doing was practicing alchemy, and their actions were misunderstood by officials who simply lumped everything together. So an alchemist called William Bloomfield, he wrote a very famous poem called Bloomfield's Blossoms, which was published by Elias Ashmole in the 17th century. But Bloomfield himself was in prison for conjuring. He wrote a moving petition to the king, who was Henry the Eighth at the time, essentially arguing that the kind of work he was doing, which, of course, was based on strange books written in a curious language which used odd diagrams, might have looked like conjuring from the outside, but these actually alchemical books which are promoting a science based entirely on nature, which is actually quite a clever way of trying to get out of jail, partly because you're attempting to excuse the crime itself, and partly because you're also strongly implying that if you're released, you'll be able to perform alchemy on behalf of the crown and maybe enrich the state. And interestingly, everybody who used that defense seems to have been released.

Peter Adamson: That's a good tip for listeners. If you're ever arrested for magic, just say you're an alchemist. And in a way, it's interesting that what you're saying, really, when you make that defense is that you're a philosopher, because you said earlier they think of themselves as philosophers, but maybe they're not saying that they're doing philosophy in the same sense that we use the word philosophy, right? I mean, I guess at least they must mean natural philosophy, which isn't really what we do in philosophy departments anymore. But do they not also, in some sense, think of what they're doing as an alternative to the kind of natural philosophy you would see, like in lectures at the university on Aristotelian physics?

Jennifer Rampling: So, yes, when they talk about philosophy, they're usually talking about natural philosophy. So they're talking about a kind of universal knowledge of nature. And it's necessary to understand that in order to produce practical results. And, of course, one reason they're doing this is simply pragmatic, that it elevates the status of alchemy and therefore of its practitioners, if you can claim that it's part of scientia, learned knowledge rather than simply a mechanical art. And this is something that alchemists and their opponents really debated backwards and forwards pretty much since alchemy arrived in the Latin West. For example, Thomas Aquinas would have placed alchemy among the mechanical arts. For him, it was not part of scientia. On the other hand, Roger Bacon, also writing in the 13th century, who took a much more positive view of alchemy, he actually claimed that it might have been part of a fundamental philosophy because it was the science of the elements. Therefore, you should understand that before you moved on to any other area of natural philosophy.

Peter Adamson: One thing that comes out of everything you've said is that there's just as in philosophy, there's quite a lot of continuity between the medieval period. So you were just talking about 13th century philosophers like Aquinas and then what we've been calling the Renaissance for the 15th and 16th century, but then also the 17th century. So obviously people are still doing alchemy in early modern England. So one thinks of Newton, for example. And on the other hand, despite this continuity, you also mentioned that the 16th century or the late 16th century seems to mark a real kind of watershed in the history of alchemy because of increasing interest in it or maybe because of royal support for it. Is there also kind of theoretical turning point here? So one thing I'm wondering about, for example, is whether once Paracelsus comes into the picture, all of their alchemical theories change overnight or is it more gradual than that?

Jennifer Rampling: So you're really asking about continuity and change. And there's plenty of evidence for both. Certainly nothing changed overnight. But I think one of the most interesting things about alchemy is the way that its proponents were able to adapt its doctrines in order to incorporate new ideas in a way that actually remained quite respectful of the earlier tradition. So I've spoken about that before when you have a text that might be reinterpreted, but that can also happen in a way that really benefits a new philosophy. So, for example, when you mentioned Paracelsus, even Paracelsus doesn't seem to have rejected the medieval alchemical tradition or at least not straight away. So one of his earlier works, The Archodoxist, talks about quintessences. And he's obviously getting this idea of the quintessence from John of Rupercissa. But whereas John of Rupercissa was working within a sort of Aristotelian and Galenic framework. So he explains how the quintessence works as a medicine on the body by assuming that the body has a complexion based on different humors. Because Paracelsus has a different model of the body, he also has a different explanation for how quintessences work and therefore how they're made. And then in some of his later writings on chemistry, he really mixes up the medieval tradition further by adding a third principle. So a lot of medieval alchemy works on the premise that there were two primordial principles, which were called mercury and sulfur, but which most likely don't map onto the elements that we know today. And all metals were thought to be a combination in some proportion of these two primordial substances. Now, for Paracelsus, that seemed unacceptably pagan because you have a dyad. Whereas a truly Christian chemistry would require a triad. So he adds a third to give it his trinity of principles. So he adds salt. And interestingly, salt is also quite important in the medieval tradition too. But Paracelsus formalizes that by coming up with a system that was later called the tria prima, the three first things, which is the notion that every substance, not just metals, can be broken down into some iteration of those three first things. So this is a very radical change in thinking about matter, but it's also one that's clearly grown out of the medieval tradition. Whether it's appropriating or deliberately rejecting medieval ideas, it's still in conversation with those earlier texts. And then something just as interesting happens. Paracelsus is not necessarily read entirely on his terms by his followers either, because many of his followers would have actually been initially more familiar with the tradition that went before. So you actually find some English alchemists during the late 16th century who have got hold of Paracelsian books and are trying to make sense of it. But they're also trying to reconcile it with the medieval tradition of alchemy that they know. So to give you an example, there's an alchemist named Samuel Norton, who came from Bristol. He seems to have studied at Cambridge, a relatively wealthy family, and he had access to Paracelsian books and seems to have found them quite convincing. But he was also a great devotee of the alchemy of George Ripley. And he comes up with a kind of synthesis where he actually reads some of Ripley's alchemy based on dissolving lead compounds in distilled wine back into Paracelsus, in a way that Paracelsus would probably have disapproved of immensely, but which seems to have actually worked for Norton, who was also testing these practices for himself. So he found a place which satisfied his philosophical requirements, but which also made sense in practice. He was able to make something that he felt he could then pitch to the Queen.

Peter Adamson: It reminds me a little bit of the way that people kept trying to use scholastic philosophy, which we think of as very medieval, and they would keep trying to combine it with things like humanist ethics or whatever. So this is something we see over and over that these medieval ideas don't die. They're revived and woven into new ideas and so on. Speaking of weaving things, before I let you go, I have to ask you about something you've been doing in addition to your study of these historical documents. So you've actually tried out some of the practical experiments, right? Can you maybe give us a couple of examples and say how it went?

Jennifer Rampling: When I was reading these alchemical texts, I came up against exactly the same problem that many of the alchemists I study would also have faced, which is how do you know if you're reading your text correctly? You may feel like an armchair alchemist that you've deciphered the terms, but if that doesn't work in practice, then it's probably not what was originally intended. My solution was to go into the laboratory. I'm not the first historian of alchemy to do this. This is something that several scholars have found quite productive over the last decade. I went into the laboratory with Ripley's recipe for the vegetable stone to see if my reading of Sericon was correct. Actually, it does produce the same effect that's described in the text, which is incredibly interesting. So there's one text, for example, which Ripley wrote, but which was later edited by Samuel Norton, who I just mentioned. And this text describes distilling sugar of lead and drawing off various distillates. And then at the end, you're left with this kind of black ash. And if you tip that out onto a piece of marble, you can ignite it with a hot charcoal. And you'll see this beautiful golden effect flowing across the surface of the black lead, which raises all kinds of interesting questions because where does that yellow come from? The substance so dark suddenly becomes so bright. It's extremely striking. And it's an effect that's described in the text. And it's an effect that I was able to reconstruct in the laboratory. Now, I'm not claiming I saw the same thing that George Ripley saw or even the same thing that Samuel Norton thought. But what I did see gave me confidence that I was reading the texts pretty much in the right way. And that confidence would survive even if I was completely wrong, even if I had hopelessly messed up my reading of the text. So extrapolating back to the 16th century, this is how authorities retain their credibility over long periods of time, even if the underlying chemistry has changed, because the chemistry can change even by accident, simply because you happen to produce an effect which convinced you in the moment, which gave you some good chemistry and which also seemed concordant with your textual source.