2011/03/01 by Lauren Kassell
Arts and Humanities · #History of Science and Medicine #History of Science and Natural History #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/007327531104900103
In 1688 William Cooper, a London bookseller, published A catalogue of chymicall books. For two decades he had collected these titles, locating, identifying and recording details of 422 English books. This list documents one component of the history of alchemy. It also provides a measure of the vitality of alchemical pursuits in Restoration England. The number of titles listed in Cooper’s Catalogue are plotted by year in Figure 1. Cooper lists several dozen alchemical books printed in London in the second half of the sixteenth century, with a concentration of activity in the 1590s. The first decade of the new century was relatively quiet. Production then rose slightly and ran at a relatively even pace through to the 1640s. It increased tenfold in the 1650s. After the Restoration, production continued at this elevated level until trailing off at the end of the century. These books present historians of science with two apparent paradoxes. The first is that they made secret knowledge public. Alchemy was an arcane art. Its traditions were learned through divine inspiration, instruction by a master under an oath of secrecy, and the study of esoteric texts. These texts encoded the procedures to make the philosophers’ stone. In prose and verse, paradoxes, digressions, erroneous quantities, numerical encodings, metaphors and allegories concealed secrets from the uninitiated reader. Some works bore the name of a mythical or pseudonymous