An intellectual biography of Van Helmont (1579-1644), showing a scholarly appreciation of his creative insights.

William Newman and Lawrence Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory experiments of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy.

"In the following pages, I will outline the complex intellectual traditions surrounding the interaction of chemistry and Genesis from classical times into the seventeenth century. I will detail the baptism of chemistry into a Christian natural philosophy by Paracelsus and his heirs in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Chemical philosophers reexamined matter theory in light of Genesis. They developed a new epistemology, which focused on experiencing nature rather than relying on accepted texts. This attitude fostered quantitative experimentation, which ultimately transformed chemistry. With this transformation, Genesis itself lost its importance; the 'reading' of nature was no longer dependent on theological considerations. Chemistry moved from a theological to secular interpretation of nature, as is found in modern science."--Preface, p. xiii.

This volume is the first to adopt systematically a comparative approach to the role of ancient texts and traditions in early modern scholarship, science, medicine, and theology. It offers a new method for understanding early modern knowledge.

Alchemy, the Noble Art, conjures up scenes of mysterious, dimly lit laboratories populated with bearded old men stirring cauldrons. Though the history of alchemy is intricately linked to the history of chemistry, alchemy has nonetheless often been dismissed as the realm of myth and magic, or fraud and pseudoscience. And while its themes and ideas persist in some expected and unexpected places, from the Philosopher's (or Sorcerer's) Stone of Harry Potter to the self-help mantra of transformation, there has not been a serious, accessible, and up-to-date look at the complete history and influence of alchemy until now.

The great Paracelsian scholar Walter Pagel and the pioneer medical historian Kurt Polycarp Sprengel identified Petrus Severinus' Idea Medicinæ (1571) as an influential vehicle for the elaboration and diffusion of Paracelsian ideas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a process that has recently come under renewed scrutiny. Severinus' conception that diseases grow from living, seed-like entities proved to be an especially important idea, which was recognized by prominent scientific and medical authors from Oswald Croll and Daniel Sennert to Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle. But they also formed a useful theoretical model for reconciling ideas about physical causation with certain Christian Platonist concerns in Protestant theology. A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine is the first book-length monograph to treat Severinus, a Danish royal physician and contemporary of the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, and to present his ideas in their historical context as well as considering their ramifications for medical and religious theory in the decades prior to the Thirty Years' War. This book will prove to be a useful tool in the reexamination of the process by which Paracelsian ideas were spread and assimilated and will appeal to all those interested the intellectual background for the work of Tycho Brahe and his students and the role of Paracelsian and Hermetic metaphysical ideas in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.