The Mirror of Alchimy is a short alchemical manual, known in Latin as Speculum Alchemiae. Translated in 1597, it was only the second alchemical text printed in the English language. Long ascribed to Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the work is more likely the product of an anonymous author who wrote between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries.
The Mirror of Alchimy is a translation of earlier works found in Latin and French. The earliest known manuscript copy is in Latin and dates from the fifteenth century. It was published as Speculum Alchemiae in Johannes Petreius' De alchimia. This was the first alchemical compendium, and was printed in Nuremberg in 1541. [1] The volume also included five works attributed to Geber, the works of Calid and Ortolanus, and three other texts.
Portions of De alchimia were translated into French in 1557 as Le miroir d'alquimie. [2] The French volume was published in four parts. Speculum Alchemiae was translated by Nicolas Bernard and appears in French at the beginning of part one. Here, Pseudo-Bacon's work is featured alongside the texts attributed to Hortulanus and Calid from the Latin edition. The series also included a second work attributed to Roger Bacon, De l'admirable puissance del'art, & de nature, ou est traicté de la pierre philosophale. Three additional works attributed to Jean de Mehun, Claude Celestin, and Pope John XXII were also incorporated. [3]
The English version of The Mirror of Alchimy was translated from the French and printed at London in 1597. Just three of the appended texts found in Le miroir d'alquimie were retained for the English book. The work was printed by Thomas Creede (fl. 1593-1617) for the publisher Richard Olive. [4]
In 1602, the Latin version of Speculum Alchemiae appeared in Volume II of the influential Theatrum Chemicum.
On the title page the publisher describes the book as The mirror of alchimy, composed by the thrice-famous and learned fryer, Roger Bachon. Also a most excellent and learned discourse of the admirable force and efficacie of Art and Nature, written by the same Author. With certain other worthie treatises of the like argument. In the first chapter pseudo-Bacon describes alchemy as a science teaching how to make and compound a certain medicine, which is called Elixir, the which when it is cast upon metals or imperfect bodies, does fully perfect them in the very projection. The author then goes on to describe the seven metals and the method for creating the elixir. [5]
It is a short treatise broken into seven chapters, some of which are only a paragraph long: [5]
The following alchemical writings are appended to Pseudo-Bacon's tract in the 1597 edition: [6]
The Mirror of Alchimy appeared at a time when there was an explosion of interest in Bacon, magic and alchemy in England. The evidence of this is seen in popular plays of the time such as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (c. 1588), Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), and Jonson's The Alchemist (1610). [7] It was one of only two alchemy books printed in English in the sixteenth century, preceded by George Ripley's The Compound of Alchymy in 1591. [8] Alchemical texts were previously available in sixteenth century England, but only in Latin or manuscript form.
Stanton Linden writes that the description of exoteric alchemy found in this widely distributed text defined the discipline as "Corporal Science" and reinforced its longstanding association with metallurgy and goldsmithing. [9]
About this work, John Maxson Stillman wrote that "there is nothing in it that is characteristic of Roger Bacon's style or ideas, nor that distinguishes it from many unimportant alchemical lucubrations of anonymous writers of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries". M. M. Pattison Muir had a similar opinion, and Edmund Oscar von Lippmann considered this text a pseudepigraph. [10]
Alchemy is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first attested in a number of pseudepigraphical texts written in Greco-Roman Egypt during the first few centuries AD.
Roger Bacon, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism.
Pseudo-Geber is the presumed author or group of authors responsible for a corpus of pseudepigraphic alchemical writings dating to the late 13th and early 14th centuries. These writings were falsely attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, an early alchemist of the Islamic Golden Age.
The Emerald Tablet, the Smaragdine Table, or the Tabula Smaragdina is a compact and cryptic Hermetic text. It was a highly regarded foundational text for many Islamic and European alchemists. Though attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus, the text of the Emerald Tablet first appears in a number of early medieval Arabic sources, the oldest of which dates to the late eighth or early ninth century. It was translated into Latin several times in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Numerous interpretations and commentaries followed.
The Secretum Secretorum or Secreta Secretorum, also known as the Sirr al-Asrar, is a treatise which purports to be a letter from Aristotle to his student Alexander the Great on an encyclopedic range of topics, including statecraft, ethics, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy, magic, and medicine. The earliest extant editions claim to be based on a 9th-century Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the lost Greek original. It is a pseudo-Aristotelian work. Modern scholarship finds it likely to have been written in the 10th century in Arabic. Translated into Latin in the mid-12th century, it was influential among European intellectuals during the High Middle Ages.
Artephius is a writer to whom a number of alchemical texts are ascribed. Although the roots of the texts are unclear and the identity of their author obscure, at least some of them are Arabic in origin. He is named as the author of several books, the Ars sintrillia, Clavis sapientiae or Clavis maioris sapientiae, and Liber secretus.
Petrus Bonus was a late medieval alchemist. He is best known for his Precious Pearl or Precious New Pearl, an influential alchemical text composed sometime between 1330 and 1339. He was said to have been a physician at Ferrara in Italy, causing him to sometimes be known as Petrus Bonus of Ferrara or as Petrus Bonus the Lombard. An Introduction to the Divine Art is also attributed to him but was printed much later, in 1572.
Khālid ibn Yazīd, c. 668–704 or 709, was an Umayyad prince and purported alchemist.
The medieval genre of speculum literature, popular from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, was inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work. However, some of these works have a restricted scope and function as instructional manuals. In this sense, the encyclopedia and the speculum are similar but they are not the same genre.
During the High Middle Ages, the Islamic world was at its cultural peak, supplying information and ideas to Europe, via Al-Andalus, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant. These included Latin translations of the Greek Classics and of Arabic texts in astronomy, mathematics, science, and medicine. Translation of Arabic philosophical texts into Latin "led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world", with a particularly strong influence of Muslim philosophers being felt in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics. Other contributions included technological and scientific innovations via the Silk Road, including Chinese inventions such as paper, compass and gunpowder.
Theatrum Chemicum is a compendium of early alchemical writings published in six volumes over the course of six decades. The first three volumes were published in 1602, while the final sixth volume was published in its entirety in 1661. Theatrum Chemicum remains the most comprehensive collective work on the subject of alchemy ever published in the Western world.
De vetula is a long 13th-century elegiac comedy written in Latin. It is pseudepigraphically signed "Ovidius", and in its time was attributed to the classical Latin poet Ovid. It consists of three books of hexameters, and was quoted by Roger Bacon. In its slight plot, the aging Ovid is duped by a go-between, and renounces love affairs. Its interest to modern readers lies in the discursive padding of the story.
The Rosary of the Philosophers is a 16th-century alchemical treatise. It was published in 1550 as part II of De Alchimia Opuscula complura veterum philosophorum (Frankfurt). The term rosary in the title is unrelated to the Catholic prayer beads; it refers to a "rose garden", metaphoric of an anthology or collection of wise sayings.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to alchemy:
In alchemy, the Magnum Opus or Great Work is a term for the process of working with the prima materia to create the philosopher's stone. It has been used to describe personal and spiritual transmutation in the Hermetic tradition, attached to laboratory processes and chemical color changes, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and literature. The magnum opus has been carried forward in New Age and neo-Hermetic movements which sometimes attached new symbolism and significance to the processes. The original process philosophy has four stages:
The Liber de compositione alchemiae, also known as the Testamentum Morieni, the Morienus, or by its Arabic title Masāʾil Khālid li-Maryānus al-rāhib, is a work on alchemy falsely attributed to the Umayyad prince Khalid ibn Yazid. It is generally considered to be the first Latin translation of an Arabic work on alchemy into Latin, completed on 11 February 1144 by the English Arabist Robert of Chester.
Guglielmo Gratarolo or Grataroli or Guilelmus Gratarolus was an Italian doctor and alchemist.
De Alchemia is an early collection of alchemical writings first published by Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg in 1541. A second edition was published in Frankfurt in 1550 by the printer Cyriacus Jacobus.
Tripus Aureus or The Golden Tripod is an alchemical book by Michael Maier published in 1618 by Lucas Jennis. It contains three alchemical texts: The "twelve keys" of Basil Valentine, Thomas Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy (1477), and The Testament of Cremer.
