Program

Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers

Period of Performance

7/1/2005 - 6/30/2006

Funding Totals

$40,000.00 (approved)
$40,000.00 (awarded)


Alchemy's Contested Validity in Early Modern Europe's Holy Roman Empire

FAIN: FA-51941-05

Tara Elaine Nummedal
Brown University (Providence, RI 02912-9100)

This project takes the problem of fraud as a point of entry into the world of alchemical practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. Fears of alchemical fraud responded to a vibrant market for alchemy in which ordinary practitioners flourished alongside learned alchemists. Drawing on criminal trials, patronage appeals, contracts and letters, this project reconstructs the lives of these ordinary alchemists who have been largely invisible in existing historiography. The debates about fraud, expressed in polemical treatises and in courtrooms, make it possible to examine how early modern Europeans distinguished true alchemists from impostors, as well as what was at stake in doing so.





Associated Products

Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Book)
Title: Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
Author: Nummedal, Tara Elaine
Year: 2007
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9780226608563
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226608563