Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire Bruce T. Moran “…Libavius is well known to historians of chemistry, primarily through the work of Owen Hannaway, who portrayed the pious schoolmaster as earnestly attempting to wrest the domain of chemistry from wild-eyed and epistemologically dangerous Hermetists and Paracelsians, and, in the process, transformed chemistry into a teachable discipline. Bruce Moran, thoroughly steeped in the rebarbative intellectual culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany…brings to light, not so much another side to Libavius, but much more evidence of Libavius’s valiant attempt…Moran is also able to convey the real intellectual curiosity, sometimes lost under all the polemic, with which Libavius and his correspondents puzzled out the interaction of matter and spirit, the problem of magnetism, and the mystery of vital powers in a bleeding corpse.”— Renaissance Quarterly “...As Bruce Moran argues in...his majestic survey of Libavius’s life and work, Alchemia (1597) is by no means the key to Libavius’s role in chemical history...the book opens up a neglected period that chemical historians have been too eager to skate over in the rush to get from Paracelsus to Robert Boyle...”— Nature, 18 October 2007 CONTENTS Introduction: Placing Libavius, Alchemy, and Chymistry The School, the Schulfuchs, and the Habits of Language “. . . et ut bene doceas, bene item distingue”: Distinguishing the True Art of Chymistry “One book opens another”: Texts, Enigmas, and Transmutation Structures of Practice and Communities of Meaning: The Virile Assault of Nicolas Guibert Libavius and Religion: Scripture and the Order of Nature “Legal Disorder,” Testimony, and the Sites of Sound Judgement: Georg am Wald and Neoparacelsus Saving Medicine by Taking a Beating— Paracelsian Deceit vs. Hermetic Certainty: Brawling with Georg Graman and Henning Scheunemann A Sickle in a Foreign Field: Libavius and the Doctors at Paris The Sons of Unknown Fathers: Medical Separations, Philosophical Mixtures, and The Triumph of Alchemy “What kind of vanity is that?” Controversy and the Conceit of Revealed Knowledge: Defending Ancient Learning and the “Invisibles” of Nature “They call us crazy”: Vital Philosophy and the Deficiency of the Arts Aristotelian Possibilities: The “magisteria of occult qualities,” aurum potabile, and the Power of Vipers Sorcery and an Uncertain Judgement about an Uncertain Thing: The Weapon Salve and Bleeding Cadavers Alchemy, Artisans, and Personality in the History of Science and Medicine Bibliography. Index   August 2007, vii+344 pp., cloth bound and jacketed, ISBN 978-0-88135-395-2, $49.50.