num_pages: 280
description: What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common menand occasionally womenwho made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques inventions and cures these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time satirists artists and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europes social and economic ills.Drawing on criminal trial records contracts laboratory inventories satires and vernacular alchemical treatises Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire situates the everyday alchemists largely invisible to modern scholars until now at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists Tara Nummedal shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the real alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce trust and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.
language: English
title: Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
publisher: University of Chicago Press