2004
Volume 31, Issue 2024
  • ISSN: 1381-0065
  • E-ISSN: 2772-7726

Samenvatting

Abstract

In 1667 the Dutch physician Johannes Fridericus Helvetius published the book , in which he described an unannounced visit by a mysterious alchemist at his house in The Hague. This stranger, who went by the name of Elias Artiste, claimed to possess pieces of the Philosopher’s Stone and proceeded to instruct Helvetius in how to transmute lead into gold. A short time after the publication of , Helvetius’ account achieved both notoriety and acclaim amongst European intellectuals and stimulated fierce debates concerning its alchemical contents. The polemic response to Helvetius’ book was indicative of the ambivalent status of alchemy in intellectual circles during the latter decades of the seventeenth-century. The complicated reception of this alchemical eyewitness account would turn out to be a precursor to the emerging distinction in eighteenth-century European academia, between a rational chemical science on the one hand, and an irrational alchemical tradition on the other.

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