Adepts and artisans: Alchemical practice in the Holy Roman Empire, 1550--1620

In the decades before the Thirty Years' War, alchemists were not simply figures of the European literary or philosophical imagination, but very real purveyors of practical techniques, inventions and cures. In princely laboratories, mining towns and urban centers, alchemists entered into agreements to make precious metals, advised on mining projects and experimented with chemical medicines. Others profited from alchemy by selling specific recipes and processes to wealthy patrons or fellow alchemical enthusiasts eager to explore nature's secrets. Despite the fact that some early modern alchemists were exposed as frauds, far greater numbers practiced their art successfully, and many even made careers of it. This project seeks to understand the lives and labor of such alchemical practitioners.; Most historians have approached alchemy as an intellectual problem, asking where these ideas came from, why they made sense to early modern Europeans, and how they were related to the scientific revolution. While we have come to understand a great deal about where alchemists fit intellectually into the landscape of early modern Europe, however, we still understand little about where they fit in socially, politically, economically or religiously. By emphasizing alchemy as a practice and placing it in the context of other more familiar early modern occupations, this dissertation demonstrates the intellectual, social and practical links between alchemy, commerce, faith and knowledge. In doing so, I seek to demystify the figure of the alchemist in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. Rarely the secretive practice of Faustian legend, alchemy more typically stood at the very public intersection of national finance and natural philosophy. As central European territories feared the decline of their mines and their lack of access to New World silver, princes depended on alchemists to make their mines more profitable and supplement national treasuries. At the same time, the marketplace for alchemical knowledge fueled debates about the theory and practice of natural philosophy that lay at the heart of the scientific revolution.