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The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire

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In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth.


Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher’s career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged.

ISBN-13: 9780691173238

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 10-04-2016

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

Pamela H. Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University.

What People are Saying About This

Anthony Grafton

No one has described with such authority and with the career of one of those projectors who haunted the courts of late Renaissance and Baroque Europe like so many Pied Pipers, offering philosophers' stones and irresistible weapons to any monarch who would offer them an open ear trumpet. Pamela Smith's book, in short, is fascinating, elegant, and incisive.
— Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

From the Publisher

"No one has described with such authority and with the career of one of those projectors who haunted the courts of late Renaissance and Baroque Europe like so many Pied Pipers, offering philosophers' stones and irresistible weapons to any monarch who would offer them an open ear trumpet. Pamela Smith's book, in short, is fascinating, elegant, and incisive."—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Table of Contents

List of illustrations vii

Preface to the New Paperback Edition xi

Prologue Evocation 3

1 Provenances 14

2 Oeconomia rerum et verborum: Constructing a Political Space in the Holy Roman Empire 56

3 The commerce of Words: An Exchange of Credit at the Court of the Elector in Munich 93

West Indian Interlude 141

4 The Production of Things: A Transmutation at the Habsburg Court 173

Interlude in the Laboratory 228

5 Between words and Things: The Commerce of Scholars and the Promise of Ars 247

Epilogue

Projection 272

Bibliography 279

Index 303