William R. Newman

This is very much an academic work, well-cited with minimalist prose and as such can be difficult to make it all the way through. However, those that do make it through will be rewarded with an interesting overview of the history of chemistry, alchemy and the evolution of the scientific process over time. The two authors are both professors of history while Principe is a professor of chemistry as well. These two authors bring a deep domain knowledge of both the characters of interest and of the history of chemistry - both which are well-suited for the subject matter. Overall, a rewarding yet very dense overview on the history of some key figures in medieval alchemy.… (more)

Living in a time of Dolly the sheep and bioluminescent rabbits, it’s easy to lose sight of the ever-blurrier distinction between nature and “art” (understood in the sense of anything “artificial”). Most of us are familiar with an example that Newman himself mentions – that of Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” which tells the story of a man who tries to eliminate a small mark on his otherwise remarkably beautiful wife’s face. The moral is so universal as to be predictable: his effort to perfect the already perfect is to have hubris that cannot go unpunished, it is to fail to accept in a Niebuhrian sense our own limitedness and the sin of human nature. But one of the goals of Newman’s book is to show that this conversation is much older than the nineteenth century. It goes back at least to the myth of Icarus and Arachne.

I’ve had a longstanding interest in the history of science, but this was admittedly a bit of a blind purchase from the University of Chicago Press. The subtitle, “Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature,” hinted at perhaps a bit of room for the reader of general interest, but I had no such luck. The topic is fascinating in itself, and I walked away from the book feeling that I’d learned a lot about the history of the art-nature debate in its various instantiations throughout history.

The preface offers a nice, general introduction to the history of alchemy. (It should be noted that Newman’s use of the word “alchemy” is extremely general. Scientists locked away in a laboratory trying to transmute lead or aluminum into gold should be banished from your mind. Instead, think about any kind of transformation produced by a human being, including the visual arts and, in much more recent history, the production of human life through means other than coitus, i.e., in vitro fertilization or other methods.) In fact, Newman’s thesis is that “alchemy provided a uniquely powerful focus for discussing the boundary between art and nature” and that this whole discussion “can only be understood if the reader is willing to engage with the presuppositions of premodern philosophers, theologians, alchemists, and artists about the structure and nature of the world around them” (p. 8).

He’s not kidding, either. The heart of this book is a truly exhaustive attempt to chart the history of this idea, many of whose contributors will not be recognizable, even to readers of the history of science. Some of more popular: Ibn Khaldun, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas play gigantic roles. But most are unfamiliar: Jean de Meun, Petrus Bonus, Thomas Erastus, Bernard Palissy, and Zosimos of Panopolis are just a few of the dozens. There are so many of these minor people, whose ideas loom large in the book, that they are often picked up, left behind, only to be picked up in another chapter, leaving the readers to flip back and forth in order to intellectually orient themselves.

I’ll spare you the various transmutations and permutations of these complex arguments (they do get very complex), but Newman seems to have two important takeaways. One is that our view of alchemy as synonymous with witchcraft or other black arts is naïve and undeveloped, and that it needs to be expanded to include all of the arts in the sense described above. The second and more important one is that this intellectual conversation has a long, subtle, and storied past in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. This should without a doubt be read by someone with a narrow, serious interest in this subspecialty (if this is the case, you’re probably already familiar with Newman’s name, since he’s one of the better-known scholars in the field). The book doesn’t have even a bit of appeal to a slightly more popular audience that it might have had that would have made it much more enjoyable, at least for this non-specialist.… (more)

Most discussions of the Scientific Revolution leaves out the impact that Alchemy has had on the development of chemistry, metallurgy, and (in this case) matter theory. Alchemy is portrayed as grounded in myth and mysticism, and therefore could not have influenced serious scientists.

But as Newman points out, Alchemy and Chymistry (a science that many alchemists practiced) actually had a significant influence in the 16th and 17th centuries, and must have had an impact on the scientists working in those periods. Newman uses strong textual evidence throughout his book to show in very specific ways, how Chymistry influenced the development of matter theory, specifically citing the ways in which Robert Boyle's mechanical philosophy was influenced by the work of Daniel Sennert. Sennert's use of reduction and experimentation to prove his theories was and especially important influence on Boyle.

This is not a fun book to read. In fact, it reads like a text book and is very dense with information. I was willing to work my way through it, because the subject matter was interesting enough to me. I especially liked seeing the thought processes that these scientists used, which is so foreign now, with our understanding of atoms and molecules.

I would not recommend this to everyone, but those who are interested in the subject matter and willing to put a little effort into their reading may find this an interesting book.… (more)