KAHN, Didier. Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Part 1

ambix, Vol. 57 No.
3, November, 2010, 249–74
Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and

Early Modern Europe: A Preliminary
Survey and Synthesis
Part I — Preliminary Survey
Didier Kahn
CNRS, Paris
This article provides a preliminary description of medieval and early modern

alchemical poetry composed in Latin and in the principal vernacular
languages of western Europe. It aims to distinguish the various genres in
which this poetry flourished, and to identify the most representative aspects
of each cultural epoch by considering the medieval and early modern peri-
ods in turn. Such a distinction (always somewhat artificial) between two
broad historical periods may be justified by the appearance of new cultural
phenomena that profoundly modified the character of early modern alchem-
ical poetry: the ever-increasing importance of the prisca theologia, the
alchemical interpretation of ancient mythology, and the rise of neo-Latin
humanist poetry. Although early modern alchemy was marked by the appear-
ance of new doctrines (notably the alchemical spiritus mundi and Paracel-
sianism), alchemical poetry was only superficially modified by criteria of a
scientific nature, which therefore appear to be of lesser importance. This
study falls into two parts. Part I provides a descriptive survey of extant
poetry, and in Part II the results of the survey are analysed in order to
highlight such distinctive features as the function of alchemical poetry, the
influence of the book market on its evolution, its doctrinal content, and the
question of whether any theory of alchemical poetry ever emerged. Part II is
accompanied by an index of the authors and works cited in both parts.
Introduction
Alchemical poetry has been little studied. Contrary to what one might think, it is
impossible to consider it monolithically, as alchemical poems may come in all shapes
and sizes, from the shortest and most arid didactic verse, to great humanistic endeav-
ours intended to rival the Georgics or other illustrious models. As a first attempt,
© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2010 DOI 10.1179/174582310X12849808295788
250 DIDIER KAHN
I will only try to sketch out a typology and chronology, before proposing a prelimi-
nary synthesis. I will approach medieval and modern alchemical poetry by drawing
on the Latin tradition as well as the diverse vernacular traditions, without losing sight
of the fact that the available documentation is largely incomplete, and that many
manuscripts, sometimes full of surprises, remain to be explored.
Poetry already existed in Greek alchemy, arising after the sixth century in the
Byzantine world. These poems, composed in iambic trimeter, bear the names of
Heliodorus, Theophrastus, Hierotheus, and Archelaus.1 More alchemical poems can
be found in Arabic alchemy.2 While a full account awaits the attention of a great
Hellenist or Arabist scholar, we may nonetheless infer that alchemical poetry
flourished in all cultures where alchemy developed.
The medieval period
Alchemical poetry in Latin

There are no known examples of Arabic alchemical poems translated into Latin
verse.3 The first Latin alchemical poems therefore emerge ex nihilo or, if one prefers,
through the imitation of nonalchemical models. The first extant traces of such poems
date to the fourteenth century. However, as early as the thirteenth century, we find
an alchemical section of nearly one hundred verses in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la
Rose, composed in old French.
At first glance, Latin medieval alchemical poetry is represented by more than two
thousand verses.4 Most of these were edited in 1625 (by Johannes Rhenanus, himself
a poet5), and it appears that — at least in this edition — these verses often repeat one
another.6 As a result, their number is certainly lower than it first appears to be. These
1
See: Günther Goldschmidt, Heliodori carmina quattuor ad fidem codicis Casselani [Giessen: Alfred
Töpelmann, 1923 (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten XIX, 2), 1–59]; and Jean Letrouit,
“Chronologie des alchimistes grecs,” in Alchimie: art, histoire et mythes, ed. D. Kahn and S. Matton (Paris/
Milan: SÉHA/Archè, 1995), 11–93, on 82–83. C. A. Browne has attempted an English translation: C. A.
Browne, “Rhetorical and Religious Aspects of Greek Alchemy, Including a Translation of the Poem of the
Philosopher Archelaos Upon the Sacred Art,” Ambix 2 (1946): 129–137, and Ambix 3 (1948): 15–25.
2
The best known example is that of Ibn Umail (ca. 900–960), although there are many others, including
the poems attributed to Khâlid ibn Yazîd (died 704). See Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissen-
schaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 193–94, 218 and ff.
3
Ibn Umail’s poem is probably the only Arabic alchemical poem to have been translated into Latin (under the
title Epistola solis ad lunam crescentem). However, this was a prose translation. See M. Turâb ‘Alî, H. E.
Stapleton and M. Hidâyat ‘Husain, “Three Arabic Treatises on Alchemy by Muhammad bin Umail (10th
Century ad),” Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 12, no. 1 (1933): 1–213.
4
Dorothea Waley Singer and Annie Anderson, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in
Great Britain and Ireland Dating from before the XVI Century (Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1928–1931),
509–77 (“Alchemical Verse and Commentaries Thereon”); this includes only a proportion of what exists,
although admittedly a considerable one.
5
Rhenanus translated an English moral comedy into German iambic pentameter in 1613. See Philipp Losch,
Johannes Rhenanus, ein Casseler Poet des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Marburg, 1895).
6
Hermann Condeesyanus [Johannes Rhenanus], Harmoniae inperscrutabilis Chymico-Philosophicae, sive
Philosophorum antiquorum consentientium . . . Decas I (Frankfurt: Conrad Eifrid, 1625), 62–124. This edition
falls into three parts: 1. Rasis Cestrensis [sic], Liber luminum (incipit “Si cupis alchymicos athleta subire
labores . . .”), 62–92; 2. Rasis Cestrensis, Lumen luminum (incipit “Cum per naturam mundi noscas genituram
. . .”), 93–106 (this collection comprises, among others, the verses brought together under the title Gemma
salutaris); 3. Merlin (“Philosopho Anglo famosissimo”), Laudabile sanctum (incipit “Est lapis occultus secrete
valle sepultus . . .”), 107–24.
ALCHEMICAL POETRY IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE 251
poems are principally composed of leonine verses, brought together under such vague
titles as Laudabile sanctum, Gemma salutaris, or Liber luminum.7 Their genre is, for
the most part, enigmatic or allegorical, as may be seen from the typical example
given below. This poem lacks a title, and is attributed in manuscript to different
mythical authors, notably “Rasis Cestrensis” and Merlin.8 Its great popularity among
both medieval and early modern alchemists (it was printed many times after 1550)
may be attributable to the fact that, in an attractive, easily memorable form, it
provides a variety of names and attributes for “the stone” (lapis), i.e. either the
Philosophers’ Stone, or its prime matter. It could therefore be conveniently invoked
whenever an author needed to touch on the obscurity of alchemical writing, whether
seeking to disclose the name of the prime matter or, alternatively, to disguise it, as is
so often the case in alchemical texts:9
Est lapis occultus, & in imo fonte sepultus, There is a hidden stone, buried in the depths of a fountain, /
Vilis et ejectus, fimo vel stercore tectus: It is vile and rejected, covered in dung or faeces. / This
Unus habet vivus lapis omnia nomina divus, lively, divine stone, though unique, bears all names, / Hence
Unde Deo plenus sapiens dixit Morienus Morienus,10 filled by God with wisdom, says: / This stone
Non lapis hic lapis est animal quod gignere fas est, which is no stone, is a living being that one can produce, /
Et lapis hic avis [est], & non lapis aut avis hic est: This stone is a bird, and neither stone nor bird: / This stone
Hic lapis est moles, stirps, & Saturnia proles, is the matter, the root and the fruit of Saturn, / This stone is
Juppiter hic lapis est, Mars, Sol, Venus, et lapis hic est. Jupiter, and also Mars, the Sun and Venus. / It is winged
Alliger et Luna lucidior omnibus una, [Mercury] and it is the Moon, shining alone more than all /
[Est] nunc argentum, nunc aurum, nunc elementum, Now silver, now gold, now an element; / Now water, now
Nunc aqua, nunc vinum, nunc sanguis, nunc crisolinum: wine, now blood, now crisolinum,11 / Now virgin’s milk,
Nunc lac virginum, nunc spuma maris, vel acetum, now sea foam or vinegar, / Sometimes it drips urine in a
Nunc in sentina foetenti stillat urina, stinking sewer, / Sometimes it is rock salt, almisadir,12
Nunc quoque gemma salis, Almisadir, sal generalis, common salt, / It is called orpiment, the first element, / or
Auripigmentum primum statuunt elementum, the sea cleansed, purified by sulfur. / Thus it is disguised by
Nunc mare purgatum cum sulphure purificatum: those who do not want to reveal it to fools, / Thus it is
Siccine transponunt quod stultis pandere nolunt, represented so that the wise man is not misled, / and so that
Sicque figuratur sapiens ne decipiatur, which we treat of is not handed out to fools. / This moon,
Et quod tractatur stultis ne distribuatur. which is but one, is given all names.
Omnibus haec luna vocatur nominibus una.
7
Some have been studied from the perspective of metre by Helmut Birkhan, Die alchemistische Lehrdichtung
des Gratheus filius philosophi in Cod. Vind. 2372 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1992), vol. I, 156–62; see also vol. II, 317–19.
8
See Didier Kahn, “Littérature et alchimie au Moyen Age: de quelques textes alchimiques attribués à Arthur et
Merlin,” Le Crisi dell’alchimia/The Crisis of Alchemy, in Micrologus 3 (1995): 227–62, on 239–42.
9
Facing my translation, I give the text that was published in the Rosarium philosophorum (Frankfurt, 1550),
an anonymous alchemical anthology of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Square brackets denote the
changes imposed by the versification, in accordance with the corrections made by L. Claren and J. Huber in
Rosarium philosophorum. Ein alchemisches Florilegium des Spätmittelalters, ed. Joachim Telle (Weinheim:
VCH, 1992), vol. II, 149–50.
10
On the Morienus (Liber de compositione alchemiae), perhaps the earliest alchemical treatise to have been
translated from the Arabic, in 1144, see: Lee Stavenhagen, “The Original Text of the Latin Morienus,” Ambix
17 (1970): 1–12; Lee Stavenhagen, A Testament of Alchemy, Being the Revelations of Morienus, Ancient
Adept and Hermit of Jerusalem, to Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu’Awiyya, King of the Arabs (Hanover, N.H.: The
Brandeis University Press, 1974); Ahmad Y. Al-Hassan, “The Arabic Original of Liber de compositione
alchemiae,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 14 (2004): 213–32; and Eleonora Bachi and Matteo Martelli,
“Il principe åālid bin Yazīd e le origine dell’alchimia araba,” in ‘Uyūn al-Akhbār, ed. D. Cevenini and
S. D’Onofrio, vol. 3 : Conflitti e dissensi nell’Islam, Bologna: Il Ponte, 2009, 85–120.
11
Apparently a corrupt term.
12
Almisadir denotes sal ammoniacus in Latino-Arabic alchemy, as confirmed by medieval synonymies and
by Martin Ruland’s Lexicon Alchemiae (1612). See Gerhard Brey, “Salmiak,” in Alchemie. Lexikon einer
hermetischen Wissenschaft, ed. C. Priesner and K. Figala (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 317–18.
252 DIDIER KAHN
This text is a very representative sample of medieval alchemical poetry in Latin.

It includes devices of a mnemonic nature, as well as a certain level of literary
elaboration, although this latter aspect is, in part, a natural consequence of the
enigmatic nature of the content.
To this, one may add some more elaborate, isolated poems that have often
remained in manuscript, such as the Lumen secretorum by the fourteenth-century
Johannes Ticinensis (Johannes von Teschen), which employs various forms of figura-
tive language.13 One should also add the verse adaptation, probably dating from
the fifteenth century, of a famous medieval alchemical allegorical text, namely the
Visio Arislei (one of the discourses (sermones) making up the Turba philosophorum,
a treatise translated from Arabic around the thirteenth century).14
Despite the huge number of medieval alchemical verses extant (see also, below, the
Latin translation of the pseudo-Lullian Ctalan Cantilena), we should bear in mind
that, in the Middle Ages, Latin alchemical poetry represented a distinct minority,
both quantitatively and qualitatively, as compared with Latin alchemical literature as
a whole. This fact stands in stark contrast to the ubiquity of other forms of didactic
poetry in the Latin literature of the Middle Ages.15 Alchemical poetry of this period
also seems to favour figurative expression and an enigmatic style.
Medieval alchemical poetry in the vernacular: excerpts from texts of an

encyclopaedic character
It was during the fourteenth century that alchemical literature began to develop in
the European vernacular languages, along with alchemical poetry. However, the
earliest vernacular alchemical verses are those which make up the alchemical section
of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose (ca. 1270–1280).16 This section, comprising
nearly a hundred verses, is a typical example of didactic poetry.
We might expect that this material’s inclusion within an encyclopaedic framework
such as Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose would make it an isolated case, given that
it provides a very small component of a much larger whole (nearly 17,600 verses).
However, the same situation is later encountered in Germany and England. We find
an alchemical section of approximately fifty verses in Heinrich von Mügeln’s Der
meide kranz, an allegorical poem in praise of the emperor Charles IV dating from the
mid-fourteenth century (ca. 1355). Like Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, this poem
13
Joachim Telle, “Johannes von Teschen,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. IV
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), col. 774–76.
14
Sven Limbeck, “Die Visio Arislei. Überlieferung, Inhalt und Nachleben einer alchemischen Allegorie. Mit
Edition einer Versfassung,” in Iliaster: Literatur und Naturkunde in der frühen Neuzeit. Festgabe für Joachim
Telle zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. W. Kühlmann and W.-D. Müller-Jahncke (Heidelberg: Manutius, 1999),
167–90.
15
In this regard, see: Robert M. Schuler, “Theory and Context of the Didactic Poem: Some Classical, Mediaeval,
and Later Continuities,” Florilegium 5 (1983): 1–43, esp. 21–29; and, of course, Thomas Haye, Das lateinische
Lehrgedicht im Mittelalter: Analyse einer Gattung (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
16
Ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1992; coll. “Lettres Gothiques”), vv. 16069–152; see also
the editions of Ernest Langlois (Paris: Champion, 1922), vol. IV, and Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1979),
vol. II, and William R. Newman’s commentary in Promethean Ambitions. Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect
Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77–82 and ff.
was influenced by Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus.17 The poem’s framework consists

of the following: the twelve liberal arts, followed by the twelve virtues, march in front
of the emperor so that he may judge who will be worthy of wearing the crown of the
Virgin Mary. That there are twelve liberal arts, rather than the usual seven, is due to
the fact that Heinrich von Mügeln added philosophy, physics, alchemy, metaphysics
and theology to the trivium and the quadrivium. Theology is ultimately judged to be
worthy of the crown, since, unlike the other arts, which are all dependent on nature,
only theology can elevate itself to God.
Thirty years later (ca. 1386–1390), this time in English, an alchemical passage of
approximately 160 verses appeared in John Gower’s Confessio amantis. In this vast
narrative poem, the Lover, reduced to despair, is on the brink of death when Venus
sends him her chaplain, Genius, to absolve him of his seven cardinal sins against love.
The fourth of these is sloth. As Genius describes the various manifestations of this
sin, he embarks on a praise of labour, listing its various accomplishments, which
include the achievements of alchemy.18
These three passages, although merely components of greater works, nevertheless
share one feature: each would later become isolated from its original, nonalchemical
context and acquire separate circulation, as early as the fifteenth century in alchemi-
cal manuscripts, and later in printed form. The great success of the alchemical section
of the Roman de la Rose gave rise to an entire pseudoepigraphic tradition, consisting
of both verse and prose, based on the name of Jean de Meun (sometimes confused
with the scholar Jean de Murs).19 Heinrich von Mügeln also came to be regarded as
an alchemical authority until the end of the sixteenth century, although to a lesser
extent.20 Even Gower’s verses appeared, rather later, in an anthology of English
alchemical poems, Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652).21
Alchemical sections also appeared in many other encyclopaedic texts, notably those
of Vincent de Beauvais. However, neither Vincent de Beauvais nor Bartholomaeus
Anglicus, nor, in fact, the author of any other medieval encyclopaedia, was ever
recognised as an alchemical authority, and nor did their sections on alchemy appear
separately in manuscripts, or in print. It therefore appears that the verse format
was instrumental in determining selection. We must add to this the tremendous
popularity of the Roman de la Rose and, therefore, its great authority, which was
17
Regarding this passage, see: Barbara Obrist, Les Débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982),
42–43; and Herwig Buntz, “Heinrich von Mügeln als alchimistische Autorität,” Zeitschrift für Deutsches
Altertum und Deutsche Literatur 103 (1974): 144–52. For an English translation, see Annette Volfing, Heinrich
von Mügeln, “Der meide kranz.” A Commentary (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997), 151–62.
18
Ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), Book IV, vv. 2363–2700, at vv. 2462–625. Regarding
this section, see: George G. Fox, The Mediaeval Sciences in the Works of John Gower (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1931), 114–135; and Peter Nicholson, An Annotated Index to the Commentary on
Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), 294–99.
19
See Pierre-Yves Badel, “Lectures alchimiques du Roman de la Rose,” Chrysopoeia 5 (1992–1996): 173–90, on
175–80.
20
Buntz, “Heinrich von Mügeln als alchimistische Autorität.”
21
Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Containing Severall Poeticall Pieces of our Famous English
Philosophers, who have written the Hermetique Mysteries in their owne Ancient Language (London:
J. Grismond for Nathan Brooke, 1652), 368–73 (and 484–86 for Ashmole’s notes on Gower). See Robert M.
Schuler, English Magical and Scientific Poems to 1700. An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland,
1979), 40, no. 237.
254 DIDIER KAHN
certainly instrumental in the writing of alchemical passages by Heinrich von Mügeln

and Gower.
A similar case is that of the alchemical section of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum
secretorum. This treatise of statecraft, fictitiously addressed to Alexander the Great,
contains chapters on ethics, hygiene, politics, and justice, as well as various sections
on astrology, alchemy, physiognomy, and the hidden properties of plants. Its
extremely wide diffusion in both East and West resulted not only in vernacular
prose versions, but also in verse adaptations.22 The alchemical section alone, trans-
lated into German verse, circulated in the fifteenth century.23 At around the same time
in England, the entire text was adapted into verse by John Lydgate and Benedict
Burgh, while the alchemical section alone (26 stanzas of 390) was extracted and
published by Ashmole in 1652.24 In France, by contrast, it seems that the alchemical
section was translated only into prose.25
We must now consider what place alchemical poetry occupied, and how it devel-
oped in the Middle Ages in each of the vernacular languages where this genre was
represented.
Medieval alchemical poetry in the vernacular: a panoramic view

Regardless of the particular language, we encounter three main categories in
vernacular alchemical poems: gnomic poetry, enigmatic poetry and didactic poems.
These appear with many possible variations and, at times, with specific national
characteristics that I will point to.
It is in England that alchemical poetry developed most fully. In Italian, all that is
known is reducible to very little — to the extent that Catalan poetry seems relatively
more significant. In contrast, alchemical poetry is fairly well represented in French
and in German.
Hardly any medieval alchemical texts in Italian are known, in either verse or
prose.26 Generally speaking, Italian scientific poetry was scarce in the Middle Ages,
owing to a lack of vernacular models (this genre remained foreign to Dante as well
as Petrarch). One has to wait until the Renaissance to see scientific poetry develop in
Italy, in imitation of Latin didactic poetry.27
22
See: Mario Grignaschi, “L’origine et les métamorphoses du Sirr-al’-asrâr (Secretum Secretorum),” Archives
d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 51 (1976): 7–112; Mario Grignaschi, “La diffusion du
Secretum secretorum (Sirr al’-asrâr) dans l’Europe occidentale,” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire
du Moyen Age 55 (1980): 7–70; and W. F. Ryan and Charles B. Schmitt, eds., Pseudo-Aristotle, The Secret of
Secrets. Sources and Influences (London: Warburg Institute, 1982).
23
Joachim Telle, “Aristoteles an Alexander über den philosophischen Stein,” in Licht der Natur: Medizin in
Fachliteratur und Dichtung. Festschrift für Gundolf Keil zum 60. Geburtstag (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1994),
455–83.
24
Schuler, English Magical and Scientific Poems to 1700, 5–6, no. 17; Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum
Britannicum, 397–403.
25
See Carlos Gilly, “Two Versions of the Tabula smaragdina from the Secretum secretorum,” in Marsilio
Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto/Marsilio Ficino and the Return of Hermes Trismegistus, ed.
Sebastiano Gentile and Carlos Gilly (Florence: Centro Di, 1999), 196–200.
26
Michela Pereira, “Alchemy and the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Late Middle Ages,” Speculum 74
(1999): 336–56, on 340.
27
See Anna Siekiera, “La défense des artes mechanicae et la poésie de Bernardino Baldi,” to appear in the
proceedings of the international conference La Poésie scientifique de Lucrèce à nos jours (dir. Jean Dhombres,
Peyresq, 14–19 June 2008).
However, it happens that the earliest Italian alchemical text presently known is
actually composed in verse rather than in prose. This is a fourteenth-century canzone,
composed of 224 verses, attributed to a certain Daniel de Capo d’Istria (Justinopolis).
It consists of a fairly dry didactic account that is very representative of fourteenth-
century alchemical commonplaces.28 In addition, two anonymous sonnets in Italian
were frequently reproduced in manuscripts from the end of the fifteenth century.
These have been attributed to a variety of authors, including Dante, Arnaldus of
Villanova, Brother Elias of Cortona, Hermes, and Cecco d’Ascoli.29 Unkempt and
irregular, these sonnets can be situated somewhere midway between a recipe and the
allegorical style. Other Italian poems, including a sonnet that is rather more polished
than the aforementioned two, may date from the same time. However, there are no
comprehensive studies on Italian alchemical poetry.30
The Catalan alchemical literature that developed in the Middle Ages was quite
scanty, despite producing several major works of medieval alchemy. The majority
of these were translations (at least, this is the most likely hypothesis). Nevertheless,
there is at least one original Catalan composition: the fourteenth-century Cantilena
accompanying the pseudo-Lullian Testamentum.31 This didactic poem consists of
twelve octosyllabic quatrains in its original Catalan version, and was later increased
to twenty quatrains. It is highly dependent on the Testamentum, and presents its main
theoretical concepts. As it obviously contributed to the fortune of the Testamentum,
its influence cannot be dismissed. Rapidly translated into Latin, it expanded to thirty
quatrains in this tongue, and was widely circulated thereafter, as it accompanied the
Testamentum in all manuscript copies.32
In contrast to Italian and Catalan alchemical poetry, England displays an overflow-
ing wealth. Comparative studies have been made on the main topics of Middle
English scientific poetry (such comparisons do not exist, as far as I know, for
German, Italian, French, Catalan and Occitan scientific poetry, whether medieval or
early modern). What emerges from these studies is that, taking scientific poetry in
English as a whole, alchemy is the largest quantitatively represented subject before
28
Canzone di Rigino Danielli Justinopolitano, in Della tramutatione metallica sogni tre, ed. G. B. Nazari
(Brescia: Francesco and Pietro Maria Marchetti, 1572), 159–67. See: Oddone Zenatti, “Una canzone capodis-
triana del secolo XIV sulla pietra filosofale,” Archivio Storico per Trieste, l’Istria e il Trentino 4 (1890): 81–117
and 186–192; and Oddone Zenatti, “Nuove rime d’alchimisti,” Il Propugnatore, new series, 4, no. 21 (1891):
387–414. See also Snjezana Pausek-Bazdar, “Alkemijska poema Daniela Kopranina” (“Daniel of Justinopolis’
alchemical poem”), Acta medico-historica Adriatica, 3 (2005), 43–58 (non vidi).
29
See: Singer and Anderson, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts, 538 (an edition of one
of the sonnets based on a London manuscript); and Alfredo Perifano, “Deux sonnets alchimiques attribués
à Frère Élie de Cortone,” Chrysopoeia 2 (1988): 385–90. For the manuscript tradition, see also Pereira,
“Alchemy and the Use of Vernacular Languages,” 340, n. 17.
30
With the exception of the pioneering survey by Mino Gabriele, “Enigmi e liriche d’alchimia tratti da antichi
codici,” Conoscenza Religiosa I (1980): 37–77; see 70 for the last mentioned sonnet, a sonetto caudato kept in
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Magl. II, III, 308 (beginning of sixteenth century), fol. 4v.
31
Pereira, “Alchemy and the Use of Vernacular Languages,” 341–45. On the Cantilena, see Michela Pereira
and Barbara Spaggiari, Il Testamentum alchemico attribuito a Raimondo Lullo. Edizione del testo latino e
catalano dal manoscritto Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 244 (Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo,
1999), CXXIII–CXXVII, 519–25.
32
Pereira and Spaggiari, Il Testamentum alchemico, 522 and ff.
256 DIDIER KAHN
and after 1500. There are more than fifty alchemical poems in Middle English.33 It is
noteworthy that these include an excerpt from Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,”
a story from the Canterbury Tales that provides a violent satire on alchemy.
However, Chaucer exhibits such competence that alchemists themselves recopied the
canon’s long speech (through a “takeover” process, of which many other examples
are known), propagating the notion that Chaucer himself might have been an alche-
mist.34 Across the whole of English alchemical poetry, we encounter all types of style,
ranging from trashy verses, and versification as an aid to memorisation, to long works
virtually amounting to alchemical treatises, and deliberately literary productions that
imitate, at times, classical models.
A similar variety is found in Germany, although in a different context. Medieval
German alchemical poems (usually fairly short) were mainly related to gnomic
poetry, which aimed to assist memorisation of doctrinal content.35 Some German
poems come under the allegorical genre. However, we know of only one great
alchemical treatise in verse written in a Germanic tongue during the Middle Ages: the
famous treatise in Middle Dutch by “Gratheus filius philosophi,” composed of 4380
verses. This rich, highly original text, dating from the second half of the fourteenth
century, is partly didactic — including a number of very practical teachings — and
partly allegorical in nature. It may have been translated or adapted from Latin, in
which case the Latin exemplar or models have been lost, which seems doubtful. At
any rate, it was expressly intended for an audience who did not know Latin.36 It is
one of the only medieval alchemical texts to integrate actual magical and astrological
elements. Moreover, it seems to have been little known, since only one manuscript
copy survives (the linguistic factor was doubtless responsible for this). Its size,
relatively early date and content make this a fascinating case, albeit a unique one.
Returning to German medieval alchemical poetry, it is illuminating to compare this
with the English and French cases. Aside from the alchemical section of the Secretum
33
Schuler, English Magical and Scientific Poems, xiv: “By far the most popular subject, both before and after
1500, is alchemy (127 entries); medicine in all its forms (about 100 separate entries) ranks second. Poems on
these two subjects exploit a variety of modes, from propounding the most abstract of theories to prescribing
the most technical of procedures, and they may be considered typical of the English didactic genre in the
period before 1700.” See also Robert M. Schuler, Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700 From Previously Unpublished
Manuscripts (New York: Garland, 1995), xxvii: “of the surviving scientific poems in Middle English, more
were written on alchemy than on all other scientific subjects combined.”
34
The text was, of course, taken up again by Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 227–56. See Robert
M. Schuler’s excellent article, “The Renaissance Chaucer as Alchemist,” Viator 15 (1984): 305–33.
35
Joachim Telle, “Der Sermo philosophicus. Eine deutsche Lehrdichtung des 16. Jahrhunderts über den
Mercurius philosophorum,” in Rosarium litterarum. Beiträge zur Pharmazie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Festschrift für Peter Dilg zum 65. Geburtstag (Eschborn: Govi-Verlag, 2003), 285–309, on 287; Joachim Telle,
“Zur Spruchdichtung Der Stein der Weisen von Hans Folz,” in “Der Buchstab tödt — der Geist macht
lebendig.” Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Hans-Gert Roloff, ed. J. Hardin and J. Jungmayr (Bern:
Peter Lang, 1992), vol. I, 459–84; Joachim Telle, “Vom Stein der Weisen,” in Die deutsche Literatur des
Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. IX (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994–95), cols. 245–47; Joachim Telle,
“Turba philosophorum,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. IX, cols. 1151–57,
at cols. 1153–56.
36
See: Birkhan, Die alchemistische Lehrdichtung des Gratheus filius philosophi; and Barbara Obrist, “Alchimie
et allégorie scripturaire au Moyen Age,” in Allégorie des poètes, allégorie des philosophes. Études sur la
poétique et l’herméneutique de l’allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Réforme, ed. G. Dahan and R. Goulet (Paris:
Vrin, 2005), 245–65, on 262–64.
secretorum (which, as we have seen, was translated into German verse), there are,
strictly speaking and as far as we know, no great German alchemical poems of the
Middle Ages. By this I mean that there are no German poems with a certain scope
and influence — Gratheus’ poem standing as an isolated, apparently not influential,
exception. By contrast, one can cite a number of major works in French and in
English. In England, two treatises of the second half of the fifteenth century were
recognised very early on as classics of medieval alchemy, despite having been
composed in English rather than Latin. These are Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of
alchemy (over three thousand verses in plain rhyme) and George Ripley’s Compound
of alchymy or Twelve Gates (over two thousand verses in rhyme royal).37 In scope,
these poems encompass all of the aspects of the great work: theory and practice,
instructions on furnaces and vessels, or on substances to be avoided, and allegorical
accounts intended to convey the most important secrets. The Compound is also struc-
tured around a vast, extended metaphor, namely that of the “Philosophers’ Castle,”
whose twelve gates (the twelve chapters of the poem) are likened to the twelve steps
that Ripley assigns to the great work.38 It is important to note that Ripley was a
prolific author, and that a considerable corpus of alchemical poems circulated under
his name, in addition to the Compound.39
In French, one finds comparable texts, albeit of less importance. These are the
Sommaire philosophique, an anonymous poem of 565 octosyllables written towards
the end of the fifteenth century, and that would later be attributed to Nicolas Flamel,40
and La Fontaine des amoureux de science, composed in 1413 by one Jean de La
Fontaine.41 One can also add Jean Perréal’s Complainte de Nature (1516) to this
group, given that these three poems all clearly demonstrate the literary influence
of the Roman de la Rose, while also revealing, from a doctrinal point of view,
the influence of the pseudo-Lullian Testamentum.42 In contrast to the Sommaire
philosophique, which became successful only after its attribution to Flamel on the
occasion of its first edition in 1561, La Fontaine was very successfully received by
fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century alchemists. These texts remain within
the tradition of the didactic poem, with some theoretical and practical developments
and, in addition, many allegorical passages. Various shorter poems, such as ballads
37
Thomas Norton, The Ordinal of Alchemy, Early English Text Society, no. 272, ed. John Reidy (London:
Oxford University Press, 1975); George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie (1st ed., 1591), in Ashmole,
Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 107–93. See Jennifer M. Rampling, “Establishing the Canon: George
Ripley and his Alchemical Sources,” Ambix 55 (2008): 189–208.
38
Calcination, solution, separation, conjonction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation, fermentation,
exaltation, multiplication, and projection.
39
See Jennifer M. Rampling, “The Catalogue of the Ripley Corpus: Alchemical Writings Attributed to George
Ripley (d. ca. 1490),” Ambix 57 (2010): 125–201.
40
Robert Halleux, “Le mythe de Nicolas Flamel ou les mécanismes de la pseudépigraphie alchimique,” Archives
Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 33 (1983): 234–55; Pseudo-Nicolas Flamel, Écrits alchimiques, ed.
Didier Kahn (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), 75–98. Claude Thiry is preparing a reedition and a philological
study of this poem, to be published in Chrysopoeia.
41
See Didier Kahn, “Recherches sur la tradition imprimée de La Fontaine des amoureux de science de Jean de
La Fontaine (1413),” Chrysopoeia 5 (1992–1996): 323–85.
42
André Vernet, “Jean Perréal, poète et alchimiste,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 3 (1943): 214–52;
taken up again in A. Vernet, Études médiévales (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1981), 416–54, with addenda
672–73.
258 DIDIER KAHN
and chants royaux (a poetical form often used in fifteenth-century and early
sixteenth-century French poetry), are also preserved in manuscripts, occasionally
placed after La Fontaine, often attributed to Jean de Meun, and printed several times
during the sixteenth century.43 A French translation of forty-four verses of the best
known and briefest alchemical treatise of the Middle Ages, the Emerald Table, is
also known.44 We should also take into account various substantial excerpts from
the autobiographical work of Pierre Chastellain, a mid-fifteenth-century court poet
highly influenced by the aesthetics of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs. Chastellain was a
repentant alchemist, and this aspect of his life, described in detail in his poems, was
expressed in rhyming verses that are rich in ambiguity, and often quite obscure.45
Such poems do not have a German equivalent. However, in the fifteenth century a
genre arose in German alchemical literature that cannot be found in English or in
French: the Bildgedicht, or illustrated poem. The best known example is the Sol und
Luna (ca. 1400), an allegorical poem of seventy-eight verses that condenses and
translates into images the central doctrines of a medieval alchemical florilegium,
the Rosarium philosophorum. The poem itself constitutes an integral part of the
Rosarium, in addition to having an autonomous textual tradition.46 The Sol und
Luna is partly based upon quotations from the Latin prose version of an Arab
alchemical poem of the ninth century, already mentioned above, the Epistola solis ad
lunam crescentem. French and English versions of Sol und Luna exist, although these
date only from the seventeenth century. Although Sol und Luna is not a very long
poem, it has, thanks to its popularity, played a role in Germany that is comparable
(bearing in mind the difference in length) to that of the works of Norton and Ripley
in England. Like them, it was the standard-bearer of a poetry capable of transmitting,
in versified form, alchemical teachings considered to have real value. Indeed, the
strong German tradition of alchemical gnomic poetry already demonstrates this
quality.
43
See Badel, “Lectures alchimiques du Roman de la Rose,” 176–77.
44
For an edition, see Didier Kahn, La Table d’émeraude et sa tradition alchimique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
1994), 31–35. On the Emerald Table, see Jean-Marc Mandosio, “La Tabula smaragdina e i suoi commentari
medievali” and Irene Caiazzo, “Note sulla fortuna della Tabula smaragdina nel Medioevo latino,” in
Hermetism from Late Antiquity to Humanism/La Tradizione ermetica dal mondo tardo-antico all’umanesimo,
ed. P. Lucentini, I. Parri and V. Perrone Compagni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 681–96 and 697–711.
45
Pierre Chastellain, Le Temps perdu (1440 or 1448), vv. 421–62, and Le Temps recouvré (1454), passim, in Les
Oeuvres de Pierre Chastellain et de Vaillant, poètes du XVe siècle, ed. Robert Deschaux (Geneva: Droz, 1982).
See: Badel, “Lectures alchimiques du Roman de la Rose,” 180; and Didier Kahn, “Recherches sur le Livre
attribué au prétendu Bernard le Trévisan (fin du XVe siècle),” in Alchimia e medicina nel Medioevo, ed.
Chiara Crisciani and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2003), 265–336, on
293–96.
46
See: Joachim Telle, Sol und Luna. Literar- und alchemiegeschichtliche Studien zu einem altdeutschen
Bildgedicht (Hürtgenwald, Guido Pressler, 1980), 31–33, complemented by Joachim Telle, “Sol und Luna,” in
Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. IX (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994–95), cols.
19–22; Joachim Telle, “Maximilian von Eger,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon,
vol. VI (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), cols. 236–38; Joachim Telle, “Das nackte Weib,” in Die deutsche
Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. VI, cols. 849–52; and Joachim Telle, “Rätselgedicht vom Stein
der Weisen,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. VII (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1989), cols. 1044–46. The fairly early dating proposed by Telle has been criticized by Michela Pereira
(“Alchemy and the Use of Vernacular Languages,” 346–47, n. 59), but her arguments are not entirely
conclusive.
The Renaissance and the seventeenth century

When turning to the Renaissance, one is immediately confronted, as in any other
field of knowledge, with two major phenomena: the massive irruption of references
to ancient mythology; and the widespread dissemination of a notion of “poetic theol-
ogy,” which presents the poet as a kind of divinely inspired prophet. This “poetic
theology” is, by its nature, partially veiled and mysterious and, in the Renaissance,
the resulting emphasis on secrecy generally goes beyond the field of the “secret
sciences,” as shown by Dudley Wilson, among others, through the example of Leone
Ebreo.47 Within this context, writing an alchemical poem became an undertaking
fraught with new meanings. For example, we would have great difficulty finding,
in the fifteenth century, a poem such as Le Grand Olympe (ca. 1530 or 1540),
which provides a systematically alchemical reading, in octosyllables, of Ovid’s
Metamorphosis — while basing itself on the medieval Ovide moralisé.48
G. A. Augurelli and neo-Latin alchemical poetry

The prototype of the Renaissance alchemical poem is undoubtedly the Chrysopoeia
(The Production of Gold) by Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (Augurelli) (ca. 1456–1524).
This neo-Latin poem, composed in hexameters and modelled on the Georgics,
appeared in 1515, and is the first great alchemical poem to be distinguished by the
language and techniques of humanism. This is the work that would contribute most
to providing alchemy with its “humanist lettres de noblesse.”49 Augurelli is, indeed,
situated within Marsilio Ficino’s circle of influence. One of his students was Pietro
Bembo.50 His poem unites the didactic genre with a new elegance of expression, teem-
ing with ancient allusions, and contributing to the new taste for classical mythology
in alchemical poetry, while relying on one of the most substantial treatises of alchemy
in the Middle Ages, pseudo-Geber’s Summa perfectionis. Furthermore, it introduces
the doctrine of the alchemical spiritus mundi put forward by Ficino in his De vita
libri tres (1489), which would exert considerable influence on alchemy until the
eighteenth century.51
47
Dudley Wilson, French Renaissance Scientific Poetry (London: Athlone Press, 1974), 2, 4, 152–53, n. 18. On
the notion of “poetic theology” and its immense success in the Renaissance, see, in particular: Edgar Wind,
Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1958); and Paule Demats, Fabula. Trois études
de mythographie antique et médiévale (Geneva: Droz, 1973). See also Part II of this article, at n. 35.
48
On this poem, see Didier Kahn, “Les manuscrits originaux des alchimistes de Flers,” in Kahn and Matton,
Alchimie: art, histoire et mythes, 347–427, ad indicem.
49
Sylvain Matton, “Marsile Ficin et l’alchimie. Sa position, son influence,” in Alchimie et philosophie à la
Renaissance, ed. J.-C. Margolin and S. Matton (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 123–92, on 165–69.
50
R. Weiss, “Augurelli,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. V (Rome, 1962), 578–81. See also: Zweder
von Martels, “The Chrysopoeia (1515) of Ioannes Aurelius Augurellus and the Importance of Alchemy around
1500,” Studi Umanistici Piceni 13 (1993): 121–30 (to be used with caution, as the author, unfortunately not
always on the basis of consistent arguments, considers the Chrysopoeia to be a moral allegory rather than a
truly alchemical work); and Zweder von Martels, “Augurello’s Chrysopoeia (1515) — A Turning Point in the
Literary Tradition of Alchemical Texts,” Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000): 178–95.
51
Matton, “Marsile Ficin et l’alchimie”; Sylvain Matton, “L’influence de l’humanisme sur la tradition
alchimique,” in Kahn, Le Crisi dell’alchimia, 279–345, on 341–45; Sylvain Matton, “La figure de Démogorgon
dans la littérature alchimique,” in Kahn and Matton, Alchimie: art, histoire et mythes, 265–346, on 308–46;
Sylvain Matton, “Alchimie et stoïcisme: à propos de récentes recherches,” Chrysopoeia 5 (1992–1996): 5–144,
and ff; and Sylvain Matton, “Fernel et les alchimistes,” Corpus 41 (2002): 135–97, on 164–67. See also Hiro
Hirai, Le Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre
Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 47–50, 53–56, 62–72 and ff.
260 DIDIER KAHN
Within a few years of its appearance, the Chrysopoeia was already recognised as a
classic. Not only was it reedited as early as 1518 in Basel by Johannes Froben,52 but
it would be edited another twenty or so times before the end of the eighteenth
century.53 From as early as the first half of the sixteenth century, it was studied or
imitated by literate Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans: Giles Du Wes (died 1535),
Henry VIII’s French instructor (better known among alchemists under his Latinised
name, Aegidius de Vadis);54 Giulio Camillo Delminio (ca. 1480–1544), the renowned
author of the Teatro della memoria;55 Agrippa von Nettesheim, the author of
the equally well known De occulta philosophia libri tres (1531–1533); and his son,
Johannes Agrippa, who imitated Augurelli’s alchemical work in a vast Latin poem
that was never printed.56
Augurelli’s poem thus gave rise to many reeditions, imitations, and commentaries.
In addition, it was twice translated into French: once in prose in Lyons in 1548, and
again, a year later, in Paris by François Habert, this time in decasyllables in Marotic
style. It was this verse translation, rather than the prose version, that was reedited
once again in 1626. Similarly, Augurelli’s verses provided the poetic basis upon which,
in the 1550s, Antonio Allegretti constructed his Italian poem in four books, De la
trasmutatione de metalli, which was never printed before the twentieth century.57
By contrast, although Augurelli’s poem was also translated into German on three
occasions, it was, each time, in prose.58 On the other hand, there are no English
translations of the Chrysopoeia. Perhaps this lacuna is due to the richness of
alchemical poetry in the English language, which produced sufficient fruit on its own
land without needing to import any from abroad.
Before investigating neo-Latin alchemical poems further, which would lead us
prematurely to the seventeenth century, let us turn briefly to Renaissance vernacular
alchemical poetry.
52
François Secret, “L’édition par Frobenius de la Chrysopoeia d’Augurelli,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et
Renaissance 38 (1976): 111–12.
53
Von Martels, “Augurello’s Chrysopoeia (1515),” 183.
54
On Aegidius de Vadis, see: von Martels, “Augurello’s Chrysopoeia (1515)”; and Didier Kahn, Alchimie
et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 65, n. 93 (with a list of earlier
studies).
55
On Giulio Camillo Delminio, see: Paolo Rossi, Clavis universalis (1960), French translation (Grenoble: Jérôme
Millon, 1993), 93–95; Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), French translation L’Art de la mémoire
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975, reedited 1987), notably 144–87; Lina Bolzoni, Il Teatro della memoria. Studi su Giulio
Camillo (Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1984); and the bibliography given in François Secret, Les Kabbalistes
chrétiens de la Renaissance (Milan: Archè, 1985), XXVIII.
56
For all of this, see Von Martels, “Augurello’s Chrysopoeia (1515),” 185–94.
57
Antonio Allegretti, De la trasmutatione de metalli, ed. Mino Gabriele (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1981).
On this poem, see also Alfredo Perifano, “Thèmes néoplatoniciens chez trois auteurs italiens de la
Renaissance,” Chrysopoeia 7 (2000–2003): 225–37, on 234–37.
58
There is a translation by Karl Widemann (1555–1637), a Paracelsian physician from Augsburg, made not from
the Latin, but from the French, by the end of the sixteenth century (Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Voss.
Chym. Q. 17, fol. 48–58). Another, partial translation was made much later by the alchemist, cabbalist and
Silesian mystic Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689), who inserted this excerpt in his translation of Jan
Baptista van Helmont’s Ortus medicinae (Aufgang der Artzney-Kunst, 1683). A full translation was published
in 1716 under the alleged name of Valentin Weigel.
Renaissance German alchemical poems

In Germany, as in France, the medieval tradition retained its strength in the sixteenth
century. Most of the alchemical poems circulating in manuscript in sixteenth-century
Germany were clearly copied not for their (rather prosaic) form, but for their doctri-
nal content. These are generally gnomic poems capable — often more so than any
other literary form — of transmitting, in German, doctrinal content centred on
cardinal points brought together in striking formulas.59 Yet Joachim Telle, the
specialist in German alchemical poetry, points to the often paradoxical character of
these poems where they prove to be verse translations based on the Latin. In certain
cases, the process of translation into the vernacular, and the resulting abridgement
required by the versified form, transforms and obscures the original text (already
somewhat unclear) to the point where its formulas eventually come to be viewed,
by more than one alchemist, as enigmatic verses. But then, their obscurity paradoxi-
cally tends to favour, rather than hinder, their uninterrupted transmission in the most
common alchemical literature until the middle of the seventeenth century.60 Here we
can recognise an increasing taste for enigma and allegory, also manifested by other,
more elaborate, isolated poems, which often remained in manuscript. Thus Johannes
Ticinensis’ Lumen secretorum, which I mentioned earlier with respect to medieval
Latin poetry, was translated into German verses in the sixteenth century.61 Later,
we find productions that are more characteristic of Baroque taste, such as Christoph
von Hirschenberg’s astro-alchemical poem (ca. 1580, 1st ed. 1604), or the poems
attributed to Basil Valentine, namely the prosopopeia of the seven planets represent-
ing the metals (1602): poems which, enriched by all manner of mythological sources,
offer a didactic, indeed technical, poetry in a form that is still very ornate, even
enigmatic.62
Such taste also developed with the Bildgedicht tradition in German alchemical
poetry. The Sol und Luna excepted, the most famous example of a Bildgedicht, the
Vom Stein der Weisen by a certain Lamspring, emerged around 1500. Although this
famous text is of German origin, it is important to recognise that it attained a wider
circulation in its Latin, verse translation (edited by Nicolas Barnaud in 1599). More-
over, the subsequent English and French translations, dating from the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, respectively, were based on the Latin text rather than the
59
Joachim Telle, “Von der Bescheidenheit des Alchemikers. Ein deutsches Spruchgedicht des 16. Jahrhunderts
über die artifizielle Spezieswandlung,” Scientia Poetica 7 (2003): 1–30, on 3. See also: Telle, “Vom Stein
der Weisen,” a medieval poem that remained widespread until the eighteenth century; and Telle, “Zur
Spruchdichtung Der Stein der Weisen von Hans Folz,” esp. 461: this poem was disseminated in German
alchemical circles from the end of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century.
60
Telle, “Turba philosophorum,” col. 1156.
61
Telle, “Johannes von Teschen,” cols. 774–76. For other examples of poems of an enigmatic nature, see:
Telle, “Der Sermo philosophicus. Eine deutsche Lehrdichtung des 16. Jahrhunderts”; Joachim Telle,
“Fachschriftsteller als ‘Rhätersschreiber’. Rätselreime aus deutschen Alchemica der frühen Neuzeit,” in Das
Wort. Seine strukturelle und kulturelle Dimension. Festschrift für Oskar Reichmann zum 65. Geburtstag,
ed. V. Ágel, A. Gardt, U. Haß-Zumkehr and Th. Roelcke (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 263–77.
62
See Joachim Telle, “Astrologie et alchimie au XVIe siècle. À propos des poèmes astro-alchimiques de Christoph
von Hirschenberg et de Basile Valentin,” Chrysopoeia 3 (1989): 163–92, referring to other, more specific,
studies on this poem.
262 DIDIER KAHN
German.63 The images accompanying Lamspring’s poem eventually provided the

model for a great French alchemical poem of the seventeenth century, Clovis Hesteau
de Nuysement’s Visions hermétiques.64 That the Bildgedicht tradition endured well
beyond the sixteenth century can be seen from the Hermaphroditisches Sonn- und
Monds-Kind (1752), one of the most remarkable publications in the emblematic
alchemical tradition, descended from a poem of the second half of the seventeenth
century. The verses of this poem, inspired by medieval allegorical alchemy and
intended to “enlighten” the images, merely added further layers of obscurity when
combined with them.65
From the second half of the sixteenth century, the influence of Paracelsus (1493/1494–
1541) affected many alchemists in Germany and the rest of Europe. How does this
influence manifest itself in the domain of alchemical poetry?66
Although Paracelsus himself (who expressed only contempt for those seeking to
transmute metals into gold) wrote no treatises on the production of gold, strictly
speaking, other authors took it upon themselves to attribute several to his name after
his death. The most influential among these treatises was the De tinctura physicorum,
probably written around 1560 and frequently printed from 1570 onwards.67 The
success of this brief prose treatise even reached the field of German alchemical
poetry: indeed, one finds there the image of the “red lion,” which had to be trans-
formed by the art of alchemy into a “white eagle.” This imagery is also found from
the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century in a
number of poems, whether illustrated or not.68 These include Leonhart Mullner’s
Philosophia (1575), an allegorical poem of sixty verses, whose Paracelsian colouring
nonetheless remains superficial and does not obviate a deep anchoring in the medieval
tradition,69 and the verses Vom weißen Adler und roten Löwen, an anonymous poem
from the end of the sixteenth century, which claims to provide a commentary on the
De tinctura physicorum.70
63
See Joachim Telle, “Lamspring,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, vol. V (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1985), col. 524–30.
64
As shown by Albert-Marie Schmidt, La Poésie scientifique en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1938),
345–55. See also Wallace Kirsop, Clovis Hesteau, sieur de Nuysement, et la littérature alchimique en France
à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle (Unpublished, Université de Paris, 1960), summarized by Sylvain
Matton in his edition of the Visions hermétiques and other texts by C. Hesteau de Nuysement (Paris: Retz,
1974).
65
See: the reprint of the 1752 edition: L’Enfant hermaphrodite du Soleil et de la Lune, trans. Yann Lauthe
(Paris: J.-C. Bailly, 1985); and Joachim Telle, “Eine deutsche alchimia picta des 17. Jahrhunderts: Bemerkun-
gen zu dem Vers/Bild-Traktat Von der hermetischen Kunst von Johann Augustin Brunnhofer und zu seinen
kommentierten Fassungen im Buch der Weisheit und im Hermaphroditischen Sonn- und Monds-Kind,” Aries
4 (2004): 3–26.
66
On the numerous poems which either celebrated the figure of Paracelsus, or held it up to contempt, in both
German and Latin, see Joachim Telle (with the collaboration of Sven Limbeck), Paracelsus im Gedicht.
Theophrastus von Hohenheim in der Poesie des 16. bis 21. Jahrhunderts (Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag,
2008).
67
See Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France, 25–26.
68
Many brief poems inspired by the De tinctura between 1613 and 1705 belonged to the Bildgedicht tradition:
see Joachim Telle, Buchsignete und Alchemie im XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert. Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen
Sinnbildkunst (Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag, 2004), 111–19.
69
Joachim Telle, “Die Philosophia von Leonhart Mullner (1575),” in Telle, Buchsignete und Alchemie, 105–9.
70
Telle, “Die Philosophia von Leonhart Mullner (1575),” 109–11.
Another pseudo-Paracelsian treatise, written as a letter, Vom Wunderstein, was put

into verses at about the same time by an author who has remained anonymous,
and who turned out to be more concerned with form than the majority of authors of
alchemical poems — without, however, managing to achieve real doctrinal coherence
or any usable practical instructions. This author’s goal was, above all, to convince
his readers, through literary and poetic means, of the veracity of the transmutative
art.71
The Bildgedicht tradition was also represented in Paracelsian literature by a poem
dating from the second half of the sixteenth century, linked to the myth of the
Emerald Table. This poem became famous primarily through its associated illustra-
tion, adorned with the acrostic “VITRIOL” (“Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando
Invenies Occultum Lapidem”).72 “Vitriol,” a term denoting diverse materials in the
Middle Ages, notably copper(II) sulfate (CuSO4) or iron(II) sulfate (FeSO4), was often
used in Paracelsian medicine and alchemy. For example, one of the main recipes for
Paracelsus’ celebrated laudanum was based on spiritus vitrioli.73
The most celebrated treatise attributed to Basil Valentine — the fictitious alchemist
under whose name many typically Paracelsian treatises became widespread from
1599 onwards, developing a whole alchemy founded on antimony — was the Zwölf
Schlüsseln (1599), and it ends with a poem that would accompany it in all editions
and translations.74 However, this poem provides no doctrinal recapitulation of the
treatise, nor even, as one might expect from a first reading, a variation on the tria
prima (Paracelsus’ three principles of Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury, constituting all
things), but only a much simpler play on the numbers one (una res), two (Sulfur–
Mercury), and three (body–soul–spirit): a commonplace of medieval alchemy. This
poem is actually based on a medieval allegory, namely the allegory of the fountain
from the Book attributed to Bernard of Trevisan, itself derived from the medieval
“mercury alone” theory,75 and, moreover, much like Christoph von Hirschenberg’s
poem mentioned above. This poem’s success is therefore dependent on the success
of Basilian alchemy, but owes nothing to Paracelsianism. Rather, it illustrates the
constant alliance in Renaissance alchemy, particularly noticeable in Germany,
between the ancient and the new — the permanent status of the medieval heritage at
the very heart of Paracelsianism.76
71
Joachim Telle, “Von der Wahrheit der alchemischen Kunst. Der pseudoparacelsische Brieftraktat Vom
Wunderstein in einer frühneuzeitlichen Versfassung,” in Resultate und Desiderate der Paracelsus-Forschung,
ed. P. Dilg and H. Rudolph (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993), 57–78.
72
Joachim Telle, “L’art symbolique paracelsien: remarques concernant une pseudo-Tabula smaragdina du XVIe
siècle,” in Cahiers de l’Hermétisme: Présence d’Hermès Trismégiste, ed. A. Faivre and F. Tristan (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1988), 184–208. This Bildgedicht was printed for the first time in 1599. One of the first appearances
of the acrostic “VITRIOL” is in Pseudo-Paracelsus, Aurora Thesaurusque Philosophorum, transl. Gerard Dorn
(Basle: Thomas Guarin, 1577), chap. 12.
73
See Henry E. Sigerist, “Laudanum in the Works of Paracelsus,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 9 (1941):
530–44.
74
Joachim Telle, “De prima materia lapidis philosophici. Zu einer deutschen Lehrdichtung im Basilius-
Valentinus-Alchemicacorpus,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 1 (2009): 12–40.
75
See Kahn, “Recherches sur le Livre attribué au prétendu Bernard le Trévisan.”
76
Telle, “De prima materia lapidis philosophici.”
264 DIDIER KAHN
French Renaissance alchemical poetry

In sixteenth-century France, by contrast to Germany, the legacy of the medieval
tradition did not manifest as a taste for gnomic poetry. Instead, it resulted in the
long-lasting influence of the Roman de la Rose, which many readers bought only for
its short alchemical section, according to one contemporary testimony (1561).77 It was
mainly during the sixteenth century that the didactic poems dating from the fifteenth
century discussed above began to circulate: thus, the Sommaire philosophique, of
which no medieval or Renaissance manuscript is known today, was edited for the
first time in 1561 (under the name of Nicolas Flamel), in the same collection as Jean
de La Fontaine’s La Fontaine and Jean Perréal’s Complainte de Nature (attributed to
Jean de Meun), accompanied by the alchemical section of the Roman de la Rose.
However, La Fontaine had already appeared in no fewer than four editions in Paris
(ca. 1506, 1521, and 1527) and Lyons (1547); the latter was adorned with numerous
illustrations of furnaces and other alchemical equipment.78
Remaining within the framework of the influence of the Roman de la Rose — this
time, the section composed by Guillaume de Lorris rather than that of Jean de Meun
— we find a medieval poem edited with alchemical commentary by Jacques Gohory
in 1572. This case is different from those seen before, in that the poem in question,
Le livre de la Fontaine périlleuse, is not in the least alchemical. Rather, it is an
allegorical love poem in the lineage, once again, of the Roman de la Rose. However,
Gohory (1520–1576) was convinced of the contrary. He saw in it not only an
alchemical poem, but also the very source of Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose
(since the latter text was, according to Gohory, no less alchemical), whereas the text
is actually inspired by the great romance, and written in the fifteenth century.79 This
brings us to a particular case, namely that of the alchemical interpretation of literary
texts. This process is similar to the alchemical interpretation of mythology, a
tendency that developed in alchemical poetry around the beginning of the sixteenth
century with Augurelli.80 The same process can be observed in the same period in
France and England in works of lesser breadth.81
77
[Robert Duval], “Aux lecteurs,” in De la transformation metallique, trois anciens tractez en rithme Françoise
(Paris: Guillaume Guillard and Amaury Warancore, 1561), fol. *3v: “J’ay aussi extraict & joinct au dessusdict
livre [i.e. La Complainte de nature by Jean Perréal, here attributed to Jean de Meun], un lieu d’iceluy Romant
[the Roman de la Rose], auquel ledict de Meung tracte manifestement de l’art susdict, & à cause duquel seul,
plusieurs achaptent ledict Romant.” This phenomenon still occurs today, when the Roman de la Rose appears
under the rubric “alchemy” in catalogues of French libraries specializing in the occult.
78
See: Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France, 72–73 and 128–29; and, especially, Marie Madeleine Fontaine,
“Banalisation de l’alchimie à Lyon au milieu du XVIe siècle, et contre-attaque parisienne,” in Il Rinascimento
a Lione, ed. A. Possenti and G. Mastrangelo (Rome: Ateneo, 1988), 263–322.
79
Badel, “Lectures alchimiques du Roman de la Rose,” 181–85.
80
See: Wallace Kirsop, “L’exégèse alchimique des textes littéraires à la fin du XVIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle, no. 120
(July–September, 1978), 145–56; Joachim Telle, “Mythologie und Alchemie. Zum Fortleben der antiken
Götter in der frühneuzeitlichen Alchemieliteratur,” in Humanismus und Naturwissenschaften, ed. R. Schmitz
and F. Krafft (Boppard: Boldt, 1980), 135–54; and Didier Kahn, “Les commentaires alchimiques de textes
littéraires,” in Le Commentaire entre tradition et innovation, dir. M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Paris: Vrin, 2000),
475–80.
81
See the summary of my course, “Historique des rapports entre littérature et alchimie, au Moyen Age et au
début des temps modernes,” Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Ve section (Sciences Religieuses)
vol. 101 (1992–1993), Paris, 1994, 347–56, on 353.
Renaissance aesthetics also exerted an influence on French alchemical poetry.

I have already pointed to the verse translation of Augurelli’s Chrysopoeia, in Marotic
style, by François Habert (1549). This appeared within the context of editorial
rivalry between Paris and Lyons concerning alchemy, in which the majestic transla-
tion of Augurelli, published in Paris in 1549, is without a doubt an attempt to vie
with the splendid Lyonnaise reedition of La Fontaine, two years earlier, as well as the
prose translation of Augurelli, also printed in Lyons in 1548. I have also mentioned
the unedited poem of Le Grand Olympe, an anonymous alchemical reading of Ovid’s
Metamorphosis — the richest part of which is, however, the prose commentary,
which appeared later. The aesthetics of the Pléiade, by contrast, are found in
alchemical poetry only towards the beginning of the seventeenth century. The mem-
bers of the Pléiade, like most humanists, looked down on alchemy as a discipline
devoid of any ancient model, whose authors expressed themselves in an obscure and
barbaric language.82 In this regard, Augurelli’s undertaking proves, despite every-
thing, to have been fairly isolated. In France, we must wait for Clovis Hesteau de
Nuysement, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in order to find poetry, as
conceived by Ronsard, applied to alchemy. The reason for this is that, although
Nuysement received his literary training during the reign of Henri III, he published
his Poème philosophic de la verité de la phisique mineralle and Visions hermetiques
only in 1620. The former work is a late reply to the Palinodie chimique (1588) of
Antoine Du Gault (a penitent alchemist who, like Pierre Chastellain a century
earlier, narrated his bygone passion for the transmutative art).83 As for the Visions
hermetiques, which, as we have seen, transpose the illustrations to Lamspring’s poem
into verbal images very much in a Ronsardian style,84 they were imitated by the sieur
de Beauvallet, an otherwise unknown physician and poet, who published in the next
year (1621) a very similar poem, Les Prodiges chimiques. This work was dedicated to
Louis XIII, who Beauvallet hoped would purchase the secret of his Philosophers’
Stone.85
One may also cite Christofle de Gamon’s Le Trésor des trésors, published in a
rather mediocre version in 1600, but revised in 1610 in a brilliant style close to the
poetry of Philippe Desportes. This second version is accompanied by a prose
commentary, much in the manner of sixteenth-century commentaries on the great
poets, such as Ronsard and Du Bartas (and even Joseph Du Chesne, of whom I will
speak later), by the astrologist and alchemist Henri de Linthaut. This commentary
has the acknowledged aim of extracting the alchemical teaching lurking beneath
Gamon’s poetic casing.86
82
Kahn, “Historique des rapports entre littérature et alchimie,” 352–53.
83
Antoine de Frégeville, sieur Du Gault, Palinodie chimique ou les erreurs de cest art sont non moins plaisam-
ment, que serieusement refutez par le Sieur Du Gault. Livre utile à toutes gens (Paris: Pierre Sevestre, 1588).
See Kirsop, Clovis Hesteau, sieur de Nuysement, vol. I, 133–36.
84
See n. 64.
85
Les Prodiges chimiques. // Au Roy. // Par le Sieur de Beauvallet // Medecin, s.l. [Paris?], s.n.e., 1621. See Didier
Kahn, “Le sieur de Beauvallet, médecin, poète et alchimiste, et ses tentatives d’approche de Louis XIII vers
1621,” to appear in Chrysopoeia in 2011.
86
[Christofle de Gamon], Le Jardinet de poesie de C. D. G. (Lyon: Claude Morillon, 1600); Henri de Linthaut,
Commentaire de Henri de Linthaut, Sieur de Mont-Lion, Docteur en Medecine: sur le Tresor des tresors de
Christofle de Gamon, Reveu & augmenté par l’Auteur (Lyon: Claude Morillon, 1610; reprinted in Paris: J.-C.
Bailly, 1985, with an introduction by Sylvain Matton, 5–16). On Gamon, see also Gilles Banderier, “Notes sur
Christofle de Gamon,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 65 (2003): 317–29.
266 DIDIER KAHN
We could easily multiply these examples of French alchemical poetry from the
end of the sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century by emphasising, from a
formal point of view, the marked predilection for stanzas and sonnets. On the one
hand, we could add, in addition to Les Visions hermétiques and Les Prodiges
chimiques, poems belonging to the allegorical or enigmatic genre, such as the sonnets
sprinkled throughout the Discours d’autheur incertain sur la pierre des philosophes
of 1590 (which include, for example, the Emerald Table), or the one hundred
Alexandrine allegorical verses in plain rhyme with which the Discours d’autheur
incertain ends, in conformity with the long-established habit of closing an alchemical
treatise with a parable in which the practice is allegorically disclosed.87 We could add
to this list the enigma put up in 1636 on a pillar of Notre Dame de Paris in the form
of an alchemical sonnet inviting the reader to decode it, to which one “sieur de La
Borde” responded shortly after.88
On the other hand, we could assemble poems intended to transmit more methodi-
cal and precise teaching, such as Gamon’s Le Trésor des trésors, the medico-
alchemical stanzas on potable gold by the printer Pierre Pautonnier (1617),89 or the
very strange series of six sonnets among those interspersed among the Discours
d’autheur incertain sur la pierre des philosophes (1590). These six sonnets conveyed
in piecemeal fashion, along with a seventh sonnet which appeared only in 1612,
a versified French translation of the Tractatus de coelo terrestri by the Moravian
alchemist Venceslas Lavinius (ca. 1552–1602?). Through these sonnets, the Ficinian
doctrine of the alchemical spiritus mundi, of which the doctrinal framework of the
Tractatus de coelo terrestri consisted, was presented in a versified form.90 We can say
that by this date a fashion for alchemical poetry had been launched in France within
alchemical circles, as testified once more by a collection of poems (of mediocre qual-
ity) preserved in a manuscript from the first half of the seventeenth century, entitled
Voyage du terrestre Apollon, which include some of the aforementioned sonnets in
revised form.91 It would be nonetheless difficult to maintain that this literary genre,
loved by authors, was similarly successful with readers.92
87
Bernard Husson, “Un texte alchimique inédit du seizième siècle: Discours d’auteur incertain sur la pierre des
philosophes (1590),” in Cahiers de l’Hermétisme: Alchimie, ed. A. Faivre and F. Tristan (Paris: Albin Michel,
1978), 31–72, on 70–72. This tradition, which went back, at least, to the Turba philosophorum, of which some
versions came to an end with the Visio Arislei, was sanctioned by the Book attributed to Bernard le Trévisan
(end of the fifteenth century).
88
Explication de l’enigme trouvé en un pilier de l’Eglise Nostre Dame de Paris. Par le Sieur D[e] L[a] B[orde],
Paris, s.n.e., 1636. See Didier Kahn, “Alchimie et architecture: de la pyramide à l’église alchimique,” in Aspects
de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siècle, ed. Frank Greiner (Paris/Milan: SÉHA/Archè, 1998), 295–335, on
318–19.
89
Pierre Pautonnier, Le Paranymphe de la vraye medecine et Orpotable [sic] des Anciens. Avec un petit
commentaire ou interpretation sur chasque quadrain, ou est traité philosophiquement de la cure de la Goutte
(Anvers, s.n.e., 1617).
90
This was achieved without leaving any evidence as to how, or by whom, the Latin prose treatise De coelo
terrestri, originating in central Europe, and not published before 1612, came to be translated into French
some time before 1590, and then condensed into seven sonnets that would achieve wide dissemination within
French alchemical literature from 1600 to 1630. See Didier Kahn, “Les sources labyrinthiques du Discours
d’autheur incertain sur la pierre des philosophes (1590),” in La Transmission des savoirs au Moyen Age et à
la Renaissance, ed. Alfredo Perifano (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2005), vol. II,
223–57.
91
New Haven (Conn.), Yale University, Beinecke Library, Mellon MS 67, fols. 1r–42r. The first two parts are
in verse, and the third is in prose.
92
See Part II of this article, § 1.2.
Another point should be considered, namely the influence of Paracelsianism on

French alchemical poetry. The works of Paracelsus underpinned a whole movement
of ideas related to medico-alchemical matters, and, more generally, to the domain of
natural philosophy. In France, this movement inspired a great encyclopaedic poem,
entitled Le Grand miroir du monde (1587, 2nd ed. 1593), by the Paracelsian physician
Joseph Du Chesne (1546–1609) — a kind of Paracelsian version of Du Bartas’
Sepmaine.93 This poem, of course, contained an alchemical section, in which Du
Chesne put forward a theory of matter inspired by Paracelsus. Du Chesne was a
better prose writer than a poet but, nevertheless, his alchemical readership hastened
to read his poem. Here is a judgement made on the work by one of his correspondents
in 1601: “I sent someone to look for your Grand miroir on my last trip to Lyons and
read it most attentively. It is an excellent work for testifying to the things you know,
but not for teaching them, since you retain them in your mind without you ever dis-
closing anything from which one could benefit. To tell the truth, the verses are not
designed to teach the sciences, but rather for revealing the agility of the spirit.”94
The author of this letter seems to have counted on being able to extract from Le
Grand miroir some of the secrets of alchemical medicine that Du Chesne, so skilful
in the laboratory, was considered to possess.95 Disappointed, he passed a judgement
that would later be reflected by that of the most fashionable French poets of the
seventeenth century on a genre that, although henceforth discredited, was still far
from being abandoned.96 The opinion of Du Chesne’s correspondent is all the more
striking given that he is none other than Pierre de Mesmes, sieur de Ravignan, first
president of the Pau Parliament in 1584, and a member of the Navarre Academy,
established by Henry IV in Pau around 1580 in imitation of Henry III’s Palace Acad-
emy. Among the other members of the Navarre Academy, we may note, in particular,
Du Plessis-Mornay, and two most famous poets: Agrippa d’Aubigné, and Du Bartas
himself.97
Despite this negative judgement concerning the capacity of verses to “teach the
sciences,” alchemical poetry still had a future in France. French alchemical poems
93
See Didier Kahn, “L’interprétation alchimique de la Genèse chez Joseph Du Chesne dans le contexte de ses
doctrines alchimiques et cosmologiques,” in Scientiae et artes. Die Vermittlung alten und neuen Wissens in
Literatur, Kunst und Musik, ed. B. Mahlmann-Bauer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004), vol. II, 641–92, on
644–46.
94
“J’ay envoyé cercher vostre Grand miroir à ce dernier voyage de Lyon et l’ay leu fort ententivement. C’est
une excellante oeuvre pour rendre tesmoignage des choses que vous scavez mais non pour les enseigner [,] les
retenant par devers vous comme devant sans qu’il vous eschape rien dont on puisse faire profit. A vray dire
les vers ne sont point pour enseigner les sciences, ains pour faire voir la gaillardise de l’esprit.” Hambourg,
Staats- und Universitätsbibl., MS Sup. ep. (4°) 30, fol. 147v.
95
On Du Chesne’s European fame, see Didier Kahn, “Inceste, assassinat, persécutions et alchimie en France et
à Genève (1576–1596): Joseph Du Chesne et Mlle de Martinville,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance
63 (2001): 227–59, e.g. on 241.
96
See: Robert Garapon, “Sur la renommée posthume de Ronsard et de Du Bartas de 1590 à 1640,” Oeuvres et
critiques VI, no. 2 (1981–1982), 53–59; and Philippe Chométy, “Philosopher en langage des dieux.” La poésie
d’idées en France au siècle de Louis XIV (Paris: Champion, 2006).
97
See my doctoral thesis [Didier Kahn, “Paracelsisme et alchimie en France à la fin de la Renaissance” (Univ. de
Paris IV, 1998)], second part (to appear under the title “Cercles alchimiques et mécénat princier en France au
temps des guerres de religion”), chap. 7.
268 DIDIER KAHN
exist right up to the eighteenth century, the last poem being printed, as far as I know,
in 1750.98 Furthermore, libraries contain numerous manuscripts as yet unexplored.
English and Italian Renaissance alchemical poetry

In England, alchemical poetry underwent continual development from the fifteenth
century. Anke Timmermann has given some detailed information on the intertextual-
ity of this literary production.99 It is estimated that nearly seventy English alchemical
poems were written between 1500 and 1700. This number is perhaps partly explained
by the importance of poetry in seeking the favour of the powerful, although
one would still have to ask why this search led to such an abundance of alchemical
poetry in England, as compared with France.100
I have already mentioned the long, didactic poems of Thomas Norton and George
Ripley, the success of which grew continuously from the sixteenth century. To high-
light the proper contribution of the Renaissance, I will point to only two examples
among many others that belong to the Renaissance allegorical genre. The first is
Dastin’s Dreame. This poem bears the name of John Dastin, an English alchemist of
the beginning of the fourteenth century, who left behind a Latin allegorical text, the
Visio. This text describes the lament of the planetary metals (silver/Moon, iron/Mars,
lead/Saturn, etc.), who have been stricken by leprosy — unlike their king (gold/Sun),
who tries to cure them.101 In the sixteenth or perhaps even the seventeenth century,
this Latin prose text provided the basis for the 350 verses of Dastin’s Dreame,
divided into cross-rhyming octets. In this very free adaptation of the original, the
planetary metals have become the gods of Olympus, while the central narrative is
presented as emerging from a book sealed with seven seals, brought to the dreaming
author by a solar figure.102
An entirely different example of English alchemical verse, and one of particular
interest here, is The Hermet’s Tale.103 This poem is a pure and simple allegorisation,
within the framework of a mythological narrative partially inspired by Augurelli, of
a modus operandi founded on the extraction of regulus of antimony. The poem was
studied from a practical point of view by at least one alchemist, Eirenaeus Philalethes
(i.e. George Starkey, 1628–1665), as shown by his laboratory notebook, since the
98
See, for example: Sylvain Matton, ed.), “La Manne terrestre venant du ciel sur les enfens de la science,”
Chrysopoeia 1 (1987): 137–62; Didier Kahn, ed., “Les Sept visions de Marie la Prophetesse sur l’oeuvre de la
pierre des philosophes,” Chrysopoeia 2 (1988): 368–84; and Anonymous, L’Eloge du Poëme lirique de l’Opéra
de Zoroastre, de la composition de M. de Cahusac, et de la Musique de M. Rameau. Ou Dissertation histo-
rique et phisique sur cet Opéra. Suivie d’un Poëme héroïque intitulé la Pierre de touche, ou l’Eguillon des
Sages. Dédié à Monsieur l’Abbé Crisophile, par son disciple Philophyre (Paris: d’Houry fils, 1750).
99
Anke Timmermann, “The Circulation and Reception of a Middle English Alchemical Poem: The Verses upon
the Elixir and the Associated Corpus of Alchemica” (PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2006).
100
Schuler, Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700, xxxi, n. 23, xxxvi–xxxvii.
101
Wilfred Thiesen, “John Dastin’s Alchemical Vision,” Ambix 46 (1999): 65–72. Alas, this article is far from
meeting the standards of a real critical edition. I go into more detail in the French version of the present study.
On Dastin, see: Joachim Telle, “Dastin,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. III (Munich: Artemis, 1986), cols.
573–74; Pascale Barthélemy and D. Kahn, “Les voyages d’une allégorie alchimique,” Comprendre et maîtriser
la nature au Moyen Age. Mélanges . . . offerts à Guy Beaujouan (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 481–530, on 510–12.
102
Dastin’s Dreame, in Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 257–68.
103
The Hermet’s Tale, in Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 415–19.
practica described in the poem seems to correspond to some of the processes com-
monly used by Starkey.104 Now, it is true that the recurrence of alchemical poems in
alchemical manuscripts suggests that verse was considered a perfectly valid form for
the transmission of doctrines or recipes. However, while laboratory manipulations
are more or less easily recognised in many alchemical poems, Starkey provides a very
rare case in which we can touch with our fingers, so to speak, the actual technical
use made by an alchemist of such poems. This case is all the more striking given that
the poem in question, far from forming a laboriously versified set, follows a truly
narrative frame with some charm and ease, and also given that its user, Starkey (one
of the most renowned alchemists of the early modern period), was himself both a
commentator on George Ripley’s verses and the author of an alchemical treatise in
verse, The Marrow of Alchemy (1654).
Many other poems enjoyed great renown in England, e.g. William Blomfild’s
Blomfild’s Blossoms (1557), a veritable alchemical treatise, inspired by Ripley and
pseudo-Raymond Lull, and consisting of a dream, a theorica and a practica.105 If
we add to it other recently edited poems,106 and the works gathered in Ashmole’s
Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, we may conclude that, in England from the
fifteenth century, poetry was regarded as a perfectly usual mode for writing alchem-
ical treatises, which was not at all the case in the other vernacular languages, or even
in neo-Latin. It is as though, from the Renaissance, a number of English alchemists
entirely adopted the medieval Latin tradition of didactic poetry. One poem merits
particular mention in this respect, even though it remained in manuscript and exer-
cised very little influence. This is the Lithochymicus by Bassett Jones (ca. 1616 to ca.
1661), a work consisting of nearly three thousand verses, composed in 1650 and
certainly “the most ambitious alchemical poem of the seventeenth century.”107 With-
out attempting to summarise the two hundred pages of which its recent annotated
edition is composed, I shall here mention only that Bassett Jones went even further
than Elias Ashmole towards an alchemical poetry conceived, literally, as a “poetic
theology” in the tradition of Orpheus: an Orpheus regarded as the first author of
alchemical poetry.108
The Italian language also provided many works worthy of study. I have already
mentioned the work of Antonio Allegretti, emulator of Augurelli in volgare.
One might add many short, isolated poems that circulated in manuscript.109 A more
singular case is that of the Argonautica of Angelo Ingegneri, which was published in
Naples in 1606, preceded by his palinodie — the author having, in the meantime,
renounced his alchemical quest.110 Ingegneri’s scarcely known Argonautica, of about
104
George Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, ed. by William R. Newman and
Lawrence M. Principe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 244 (between 23 July and 1 August 1656).
I warmly thank Lawrence Principe for having pointed this out to me.
105
Robert M. Schuler, Three Renaissance Scientific Poems, in Studies in Philology LXXV, no. 5 (1978).
106
Schuler, Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700.
107
Schuler, Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700, 203–412.
108
See Part II of this study (Synthesis).
109
See a number of examples in Gabriele, “Enigmi e liriche d’alchimia.”
110
Contra l’alchimia, e gli alchimisti. Palinodia dell’Argonautica di Angelo Ingegneri. Con la stessa Argonautica,
dichiarata da copiose postille del propio Autore (Naples: Giovanni Giacomo Carlino, 1606). On this work,
see François Secret, “Littérature et alchimie au XVIIe siècle: L’Ecusson harmonique de Jacques Sanlecque,”
Studi francesi, no. 47–48 (1972), 338–46, on 344–46.
270 DIDIER KAHN
one thousand verses, is one of the rare monuments of Italian Renaissance alchemical
poetry. In this poem, alchemical exegesis of literary works gives way to a pure and
simple alchemical rewriting, contrasting with the mere alchemical reading of the
Argonautica of Apollonios of Rhodes and pseudo-Orpheus, to which Gianfrancesco
Pico della Mirandola (nephew of the great Pico) and his friend Lilio Gregorio
Giraldi devoted themselves in 1527 (as did Elias Ashmole in 1652).111
In the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting Italian alchemical poets was
Francesco Maria Santinelli (1627–1697), a member of the circle of Queen Christina
of Sweden. His most famous work, Lux obnubilata suapte natura refulgens
(Darkened Light Beaming Through of Its Own Nature), written in Italian despite
its Latin title, appeared anonymously and soon acquired European renown among
alchemists.112 It is an ode composed of three songs (attributed to “Fra Marc-Antonio
Crassellame Chinese,” this anagram providing the first allusion in Western alchemy
to Chinese alchemy), followed by a Latin commentary by an unknown author. The
whole poem provides an alchemical interpretation of Genesis (one more among many
others, at this rather late date). Printed in Venice in 1666, the work was later
included in an important collection of Latin treatises, the Ginaeceum Chimicum
(Lyons, 1679). Later still (1687) it was translated into French prose, facing the Italian
text. The French version was reprinted in 1766 in Baron of Tschoudy’s L’Etoile
flamboyante and, finally, retranslated from French into German in the Hermetisches
A.B.C. (1779). Besides this alchemical poem, Santinelli left behind many others,
notably several series of sonnets.113 Many other series of Italian alchemical sonnets
are extant dating from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Still unedited,
these poems can only be mentioned here.114
Neo-Latin alchemical poetry after Augurelli

In what form did the genre of neo-Latin alchemical poetry appear after Augurelli?
Some of this poetry belongs to the polemic literature that arose spontaneously from
111
See François Secret, “Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi et l’alchimie,” Bibliothèque
d’Humaanisme et Renaissance 38 (1976): 93–108, on 94–99. On Ashmole, see Part II of this study
(Synthesis).
112
Lux obnubilata suapte natura refulgens: vera de lapide philosophico theorica, metro italico descripta, et
ab auctore innominato commenti gratia ampliata (Venice: Alessandro Zatta, 1666). See Mino Gabriele,
“Prefazione,” in Marco Antonio Crassellame, Lux obnubilata, ed. S. Andreani and F. Di Girolamo (Rome:
Edizioni Mediterranee, 1980), 7–12. See also: Gabriele, “Enigmi e liriche d’alchimia”; and Mino Gabriele, “La
Porta del Vello d’Oro: iconologia e tradizione alchemica,” in La Porta Magica. Luoghi e memorie nel giardino
di piazza Vittorio, ed. N. Cardano (Rome: Fratelli Palombi Editori, 1990), 17–27.
113
Edison Simons, “F. M. Santinelli, Sonnets sur la pierre philosophale,” Recueil (Champ Vallon) 18 (1991):
95–120; C. Gilly and C. van Heertum, eds., Magia, alchimia, scienza dal ‘400 al ‘700. L’influsso di Ermete
Trismegisto/Magic, Alchemy and Science 15th–18th Centuries. The Influence of Hermes Trismegistus
(Florence: Centro Di, 2002), vol. II, 210–12.
114
See in particular Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, ms. 457, b. III, fasc. 6 (XVIIe s.), fol. 199–200 (four sonnets);
Bologna, Archivio di Stato, fondo Banzi, serie Manoscritti, b. 24, fasc. XI: Sonetti sopra la Pietra filosofica
alli figli della Sapienza ermetica contro l’oppinione di Democrito, che voleva il mondo fosse fatto d’atomi a
caso (nineteen sonnets); Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, ms. 3935, caps. C, fasc. 1 II (twenty-six sonnets
apparently written in 1725 by Antonio Francesco Afferri; see also D. Kahn, “Le fonds Caprara de manuscrits
alchimiques de la Bibliothèque Universitaire de Bologne,” Scriptorium 48 [1994]: 62–110, at 67); Glasgow
University Library, MS. Ferguson 337, item 3 (eighteenth-century), fol. 25–26; New Haven (Conn.), Yale
University, Beinecke Library, Mellon Ms. 101 (ca. 1750).
the medico-alchemical quarrels aroused by Paracelsianism all over Europe, most

notably in academic environments where learned neo-Latin poetry used to be
composed.115 This poésie de circonstance, which deserves much further study,
was governed more by humanist fashions than by the desire to produce alchemical
treatises in neo-Latin verses.
We should note here that as early as 1505, before publishing his Chrysopoeia,
Augurelli himself inserted a Sermo entitled Χρυσοποιíα and a Carmen entitled Vellus
aureum in a first collection of poems, which was then regularly reedited with the
Chrysopoeia. We should also mention the third part of Leucippi fabula by Pierio
Valeriano, the illustrious author of the Hieroglyphica, entitled Ex succo Valeriano;
Chymice, which appeared in his Praeludia quaedam (1509).116 However, it is doubtful
whether these poetic gleanings could be much increased by further research into the
literary production of other humanists, the great majority of whom had little taste
for alchemy. Thus, the Greek alchemical poems, not edited before the eighteenth
century, seem to have been unknown even to an author as well informed and influ-
ential as Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, although he knew of the existence of other Greek
alchemists.117
Although Augurelli quickly became the ultimate model for all neo-Latin alchemical
poetry, one should also mention the Zodiacus vitae of Marcellus Palingenius (Pier
Angelo Manzolli, died 1543). An alchemical passage from this poem resulted in
Palingenius being considered a genuine authority by many alchemists, including,
for example, Gaston Du Clo, Michael Maier, Herbrandt Jamsthaler, and Israël
Harvet.118 One could also add the second half of Book II of Fracastoro’s Syphilis
(1530), which describes the myth of Ilceus exploring the underworld in search of the
sources of mercury. These two hundred verses clearly belong to the genre of scien-
tific poetry, although one could classify them perhaps more appropriately as works
of mineralogy than of alchemy (as in the case of the metallurgical work of Agricola
or Lazarus Ercker), since Fracastoro was by no means a devotee of alchemy.119 These
verses do not seem to have served as a model for alchemists, who by this time already
had the work of Augurelli at their disposal.
Augurelli inspired imitators until the seventeenth century. Among these, one could
name Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533), who included short alchemi-
cal poems of his own in his treatise De auro libri tres (posthumous, 1586), and Lilio
Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552), one of whose alchemical poems was also included
by G. F. Pico. Giraldi himself reported how he and Pico, using all the resources of
humanist erudition, elaborated an alchemical exegesis of the Argonautica, based
115
See, for example: Wilhelm Kühlmann, “Humanistische Verskunst im Dienste des Paracelsismus. Zu einem
programmatischen Lehrgedicht des Michael Toxites (1514–1581),” Études Germaniques 50 (1995): 509–26;
Wilhelm Kühlmann, “Der vermaledeite Prometheus. Die antiparacelsistische Lyrik des Andreas Libavius und
ihr historischer Kontext,” Scientia Poetica 4 (2000): 30–61; Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France, 184–85
(on Jacques Grévin); and Telle, Paracelsus im Gedicht, passim.
116
François Secret, “Pierio Valeriano et l’alchimie,” in Kahn and Matton, Alchimie: art, histoire et mythes,
429–41, on 433–34 and 429–30.
117
Matton, “L’influence de l’humanisme sur la tradition alchimique,” 318–19, 325–26.
118
See: Erik Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie des Frühbarock. Die Cantilenae intellectuales Michael Maiers
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002), 77; Secret, “Pierio Valeriano et l’alchimie,” 437.
119
Syphilis, Lib. II, vv. 270–458; see Geoffrey Eatough, ed., Fracastoro’s Syphilis. Introduction, Text, Translation
and Notes (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 74–84. On Fracastoro and alchemy, see Secret, “Pierio Valeriano
et l’alchimie,” 436.
272 DIDIER KAHN
on the note by Suidas concerning the Golden Fleece that had propagated this
interpretation since the fifteenth century.120
In seventeenth-century Germany, one of Augurelli’s imitators was the Strasbourg
physician Johann Nicolaus Furichius, to whom we owe an Aurea catena (1627) and
a Chryseis (1631).121 There was also Nathan d’Aubigné (Nathan Albineus), the
biological son of the poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose Carmen aureum (1639 or 1653),
a poem of fewer than two hundred verses, should be situated in the wake of
Reformed scientific poetry, since it describes the seeds of metals on the basis of the
Biblical account of the Creation.122 One could easily extend this list right up to the
end of the seventeenth century.123
Within the genre of neo-Latin didactic poetry, both alchemical and iatrochemical,
we can discern forms as common as the didactic elegy, the epigram, and all of the
shapes that the neo-Latin ode could take.124 Although each of these examples would,
ideally, deserve separate study, this would, given their numbers, require a separate
work. I shall therefore conclude by focusing on one of the main representatives of
these poetic forms: the alchemist Michael Maier (1569–1622).125
Maier is well known for his Atalanta fugiens (1617), “an attempt at a total work,”
the guiding thread of which is the myth of Atalanta, as related by Ovid in the
Metamorphosis. Bringing together image, text and music in a series of fifty beauti-
fully engraved mytho-hermetical emblems, which simultaneously provide the theme
for a musical fugue, an epigram, and a didactic account, Maier’s aim was to penetrate
the “secrets of nature” through a synthesis of the “three most spiritual senses,”
namely sight, hearing, and intelligence.126 Through the interplay of sensory
correspondences, alchemical research opened up into a quest for knowledge.
120
See Matton, “L’influence de l’humanisme sur la tradition alchimique,” 311–14.
121
Wilhelm Kühlmann, “Alchemie und späthumanistische Formkultur. Der Straßburger Dichter Johann Nicolaus
Furichius (1602–1633), ein Freund Moscheroschs,” Daphnis 13 (1984): 101–35.
122
Nathan d’Aubigné, Carmen aureum ad Janum Cusinum, in Bibliotheca Chemica Contracta Ex delectu &
emendatione Nathanis Albinei D. M. In gratiam & commodum artis Chemicae studiosorum (Geneva: at the
expense of Jean Antoine and Samuel de Tournes, 1653), 73–77 (I was unable to consult the 1639 version
of this work). On Nathan d’Aubigné, sieur de la Fosse (1600–1669) and his alchemical activities, see Kahn,
Alchimie et paracelsisme en France, 398 and n. 218 (with bibliography).
123
See, for example, the rare bilingual (Latin–French) publication of the Verba Aristei patris ad filium, ex
caractere et idiomate Schitico, Latino rithmo donata, in Limojon de Saint-Didier, Lettre d’un Philosophe,
sur le Secret du Grand Oeuvre (Paris: Laurent d’Houry, 1688, with separate pagination). This poem was
translated into English verse at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Contrary to what Schuler has written
in his edition of this English translation (Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700, 465–66), the Latin text was not cited
by pseudo-Flamel (1612) or by David Laigneau (1611). There is no evidence to support any date other than
that of its publication.
124
See the numerous examples provided by Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 78, all situated within the German
cultural sphere.
125
On Maier, his work and his literary conceptions, see: the essential work by Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie.
On his life and his medico-alchemical doctrines, see also Karin Figala and Ulrich Neumann, “À propos de
Michel Maier: quelques découvertes bio-bibliographiques,” in Kahn and Matton, Alchimie: art, histoire
et mythes, 651–64; and Neumann, “Michel Maier (1569–1622) ‘philosophe et médecin,’” in Margolin and
Matton, Alchimie et philosophie à la Renaissance, 307–26.
126
Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, hoc est, Emblemata nova de secretis Naturae Chymica, Accommodata
partim oculis & intellectui, figuris cupro incisis, adjectisque sententiis, Epigrammatis & notis, partim auribus
& recreationi animi plus minus 50 Fugis Musicalibus trium Vocum, quarum duae ad unam simplicem
melodiam distichis canendis peraptam, correspondeant, non absque singulari jucunditate videnda, legenda,
meditanda, intelligenda, dijudicanda, canenda & audienda (Oppenheim: Hieronymus Galler for Johann
Theodor de Bry, 1617); the 1618 issue was reprinted at Kassel (Bärenreiter, 1964), with a postface by Lucas
Heinrich Wüthrich.
However, Maier’s most curious poetic work is the Cantilenae intellectuales . . . de

Phoenice redivivo (1622). As this poem was recently the subject of an excellent study,
it is possible to discuss it in some detail.127 The poem is composed of a set of twenty-
seven songs (cantilenae) distributed in nine triads, named “square triads,” since they
form three groups of three triads; in other words, their own number squared. How-
ever, in Latin and in the context of Maier’s alchemy, the term quadratus is much
richer in meaning — the notion of “square triad” immediately evoking, for alche-
mists, the conjunction of the square of the four elements and the body–soul–spirit
ternary.128 The full title translates as: “Intellectual songs in nine triads on the
resurrected phoenix, i.e. on the most precious medicine of all (which is a summary
of the world and a mirror of the universe), put forward not so much out loud but,
rather, with the depth of the intelligence, and presented to those who are capable of
understanding as the key to each of the three chests which are impossible to open in
alchemy.”129 Each of the triads is composed in this way: “By singing the Phoenix, this
rare and marvellous bird, here is the order that I have prescribed myself: each triad
alternately forms a concert of three voices. First of all, the counter-tenor expresses
the soft accent of our Venus. The crayfish, which always walks backwards, will then
provide the baritone voice. Finally, the bass is reserved for the lion, terrible in his
wrath.”130 The three groups of triads are distributed as follows: “The first square
triad deals with the names given to all things, the second contains the allegories,
and in the third one will find the application of the mysteries of art to those of
religion.”131 Here we can appreciate the complexity of the whole on the symbolic
level, and not be surprised if the work fails to go into any practical dimensions.
The Cantilenae owe as much, if not more, to the problematics inherent in
neo-Latin poetry since Scaliger, the psalmodic tradition and that of the hymns and
odes of Marulle and Ronsard as they do to the alchemical tradition as strictly defined.
To the latter, Maier added all of the trappings of his particular area of expertise, the
alchemical exegesis of mythology.132 Furthermore, from the very start of the poem,
he also alluded to Lucretius in his choice of muse: none other than Venus, as we have
seen, presented as a creative goddess and as the one who governs the great alchemical
work.133 However, we should note that Maier’s choice of poetic model is anacreontic,
127
Michael Maier, Cantilenae intellectuales in Triades 9. distinctae, De Phoenice redivivo, hoc est, Medicinarum
omnium pretiosissima (quae Mundi Epitome & Universi Speculum est) non tam alta voce, quam profunda
mente dictatae, & pro Clave Ternarum irreserabilium in Chymia arcarum rationabilibus ministratae (Rostock:
Moritz Sachs for Johann Hallervord, 1622). See the edition with a German translation and a commentary by
Leibenguth (Hermetische Poesie).
128
See Jacques Rebotier’s explanations, “La musique des Cantilenae intellectuales,” in Michael Maier, Chansons
intellectuelles sur la résurrection du phénix, trans. abbé Le Mascrier (1758); (repr. Paris: Gutenberg Reprint,
1984, with the Latin text and an introduction by Sylvain Matton and J. Rebotier), 63–72, on 65–66; see also
Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 195–200.
129
I have not always adopted the decisions made by Leibenguth’s German translation (Leibenguth, Hermetische
Poesie, 121).
130
Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 126–27. The allusion to the zodiacal houses of Virgo, Cancer and Leo
is obvious. However, the polysemy of these terms in alchemy makes their interpretation difficult, with the
exception of Venus (see the next paragraph). See Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 232–47.
131
132
133
Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 80.
274 DIDIER KAHN
and therefore playful and light — a surprising choice, given that the matter of
the poem relates simultaneously to natural philosophy and medical science against a
polemical background. It must be stated that, in reality, Maier does not identify as
much with the themes of anacreontic poetry as he does with its musical atmosphere,
and the relationship between this poetic form and the song: this with the conviction
(shared with a number of his contemporaries) that the operations of alchemy resonate
with the harmonic and musical laws of the cosmos.134
As for the title of the Cantilenae, there is of course a link with the famous pseudo-
Lullian Cantilena of the Middle Ages, discussed above. A link can also be made to
another Cantilena, which circulated under the name of George Ripley, probably from
the fifteenth century onwards, the existence of which was known to Maier.135 We
should also bear in mind that the same word, cantilenae, designates the Psalms in
both Saint Augustine and the Vulgate, thereby conferring on Maier’s text a sacred
dimension that is wholly in agreement with the post-tridentine conception (to which
Maier adhered) of the superiority of Christian references to those of Antiquity: the
superiority of David over Orpheus. Indeed, for Maier, Renaissance theologian that
he was, Orpheus was merely a historical relay in the alchemical tradition, insofar as
he had, according to Maier, employed the ancient mysteries as a cloak under which
to transmit the secrets of alchemy.136 The Cantilenae intellectuales are thus situated
within a fully Christian perspective, while also being saturated with ancient refer-
ences. They mobilise all of the resources of the intelligence towards a process of
decipherment that can be carried out only piecemeal, on various successive levels, and
with an acute synthetic sensibility.
Acknowledgement
This paper includes the essential points of a study that will appear in French in the
proceedings of the international conference La Poésie scientifique de Lucrèce à nos
jours (dir. Jean Dhombres, Peyresq, 14–19 June 2008). The paper was translated from
the French by Alireza Taheri, University of Cambridge.
Notes on Contributor
Didier Kahn is a researcher at the CNRS. He is working both on Diderot’s complete
works and the history of alchemy in the Centre d’étude de la langue et de la littérature
françaises des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (CELLF 17e-18e). He is the author of Alchimie
et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567–1625) (Geneva: Droz,
2007). His last book is an annotated edition of Montfaucon de Villars’ Le Comte de
Gabalis (1670) (Paris: Champion, 2010). Address: CELLF 17e-18e, Université de Paris
IV, 1 rue Victor Cousin, 75230 Paris Cedex 05, France. Email: dkahn@msh-paris.fr
134
135
Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 87–88 and n. 66. On the Ripleian Cantilena, see Jennifer M. Rampling, The
Alchemy of George Ripley, 1470–1700 (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2009), chap. 5.
136
Leibenguth, Hermetische Poesie, 88–89, 280–83.

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ambix, Vol. 57 No.

3, November, 2010, 249–74

Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and

This article provides a preliminary description of medieval and early modern

The medieval period

Alchemical poetry in Latin

This text is a very representative sample of medieval alchemical poetry in Latin.

Medieval alchemical poetry in the vernacular: excerpts from texts of an

was influenced by Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus.17 The poem’s framework consists

certainly instrumental in the writing of alchemical passages by Heinrich von Mügeln

Medieval alchemical poetry in the vernacular: a panoramic view

The Renaissance and the seventeenth century

G. A. Augurelli and neo-Latin alchemical poetry

Renaissance German alchemical poems

German.63 The images accompanying Lamspring’s poem eventually provided the

Another pseudo-Paracelsian treatise, written as a letter, Vom Wunderstein, was put

French Renaissance alchemical poetry

Renaissance aesthetics also exerted an influence on French alchemical poetry.

Another point should be considered, namely the influence of Paracelsianism on

English and Italian Renaissance alchemical poetry

Neo-Latin alchemical poetry after Augurelli

the medico-alchemical quarrels aroused by Paracelsianism all over Europe, most

However, Maier’s most curious poetic work is the Cantilenae intellectuales . . . de

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