Final Report Summary - ALCHEMVIENNA (Alchemical Manuscripts in Medical Vienna, 14th-17th century)
The project “AlchemVienna – Alchemical Manuscripts in Medical Vienna, 14th-17th century” concerns points of contact between alchemy and medicine in Vienna, and thus a previously unknown aspect of Central European history. Vienna’s status as a prime location for scientific discovery, in the University and beyond, is well-acknowledged in scholarship on the late medieval and early modern period. But this project is the first to examine the ways in which medical doctors engaged with alchemy, a craft and system of natural philosophical knowledge outside the academic context. Designed to expand knowledge about life, work and interdisciplinarity at the early University of Vienna, as well as the role of alchemy in and beyond scholarly contexts, this project also makes visible a significant, hitherto unresearched part of Viennese manuscript collections.
Researcher Anke Timmermann found several hundred manuscripts in Viennese repositories much richer in alchemical materials than current catalogue descriptions indicate. With collections of the Austrian National Library as a pragmatic main focus, the first part of her work explored the implications of the nature of the available materials, the project’s methodology and historiographical approach. The results, about to be published in the form of an article, confirm the project’s premise that alchemical interests were, indeed, common to medical doctors even in the pre-Paracelsian period, and that their investigation addresses a pressing desideratum in the history of medieval and early modern science. They also show that historical study of those writing and reading alchemical texts proves particularly difficult when these individuals rarely leave names or other traces of their identities in manuscripts. This article inspects a sample of fifteen manuscripts clearly identifiable as part of Viennese doctors’ collections to illustrate this point. By extension it also highlights the need for catalogues to be re-evaluated, to capture texts not recorded to date – in this case the hundreds of anonymous alchemical recipes in the Austrian National Library’s collections.
The consequent part of the project, the compilation of a handlist of alchemical items in the collections of the Austrian National Library, similarly quickly outgrew its anticipated scope thanks to the unanticipated wealth of relevant materials. But even focused on prominent items for the purpose of publication this handlist will reflect the spectrum of backgrounds and interests which informed late medieval and early modern writers’ intelligent approaches to alchemy. This research has shown that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in particular, copyists developed and refined ways of producing new texts and knowledge about substances and chymical products. As a bibliographical tool this publication provides material for future studies, for the project personnel as well as for researchers in related fields of the history of science and of intellectual and institutional history.
A case study emerging from this manuscript work, and thus the third leg of the project research, delivers an analysis of two sixteenth-century medical doctors’ manuscripts and engagement with alchemy. Although active outside of Vienna these doctors, especially doctor-apothecary Wolfgang Kappler of Krems, would have been affected by the institutionalisation of medicine at the University of Vienna: its Medical Faculty regulated the examination of medical students, the licensing of doctors and, through an ‘apothecary edict’ (German: ‘Apothekerordnung’), the prescription, manufacture and wholesale of remedies, beyond the area of the city itself. As this study shows, it was before this background that Kappler became interested in alchemical remedies. He acquired and copied an alchemo-medical manuscript of Innsbruck imperial physician Nicolaus Pol, whose library, in turn, was famous for its scientific collections; both Pol’s mentioned manuscript and parts of his library are lost today. Timmermann’s reconstruction of the libary’s rationale, the alchemo-medical manuscript’s history and both doctors’ approaches to collecting, sorting and using alchemical knowledge in their medical practice from surviving evidence constitute major contributions to the history of early modern knowledge.
The fourth and final cornerstone of the project’s results was facilitated by a commission for a Festschrift: the relevant honoured scholar, Prof. Joachim Telle, wrote a series of articles on the alchemical poetic contents of a particular Austrian manuscript codex (ÖNB Cod. 3001). Dr Timmermann’s previous project work on alchemical recipes in Viennese medical manuscripts enabled her to provide further context for these studies.
With regard to professional collaborations the interdisciplinary aspect of the project AlchemVienna translated to inter-institutional teaching (e.g. with the University of Vienna’s Classics department, which offered a course on Neo-Latin scientific texts in collaboration with Anke Timmermann). Additionally, both the Researcher and the Scientist in Charge were invited to contribute to University of Vienna’s 650th anniversary, especially concerning the medical and bibliographical aspects of the planned exhibition on the early University. Apart from presentations at academic conferences project-derived themes were also disseminated to the general public, including children, in various media and outreach activities (newspaper, radio, public presentations, blog posts and collaborations in international exhibitions).
In sum, this project represents a successful collaboration between Researcher (Dr Anke Timmermann) and the Scientist in Charge (assoc.Prof. PD Mag.Dr.phil. Dr.med. Sonia Horn). Its results not only represent stand-alone contributions to scholarship. They also demonstrate the vital role of interdisciplinary and source-based research for the history of science and thus, by extension, into modern integrated practices of medicine, science and embodied knowledge.
Researcher Anke Timmermann found several hundred manuscripts in Viennese repositories much richer in alchemical materials than current catalogue descriptions indicate. With collections of the Austrian National Library as a pragmatic main focus, the first part of her work explored the implications of the nature of the available materials, the project’s methodology and historiographical approach. The results, about to be published in the form of an article, confirm the project’s premise that alchemical interests were, indeed, common to medical doctors even in the pre-Paracelsian period, and that their investigation addresses a pressing desideratum in the history of medieval and early modern science. They also show that historical study of those writing and reading alchemical texts proves particularly difficult when these individuals rarely leave names or other traces of their identities in manuscripts. This article inspects a sample of fifteen manuscripts clearly identifiable as part of Viennese doctors’ collections to illustrate this point. By extension it also highlights the need for catalogues to be re-evaluated, to capture texts not recorded to date – in this case the hundreds of anonymous alchemical recipes in the Austrian National Library’s collections.
The consequent part of the project, the compilation of a handlist of alchemical items in the collections of the Austrian National Library, similarly quickly outgrew its anticipated scope thanks to the unanticipated wealth of relevant materials. But even focused on prominent items for the purpose of publication this handlist will reflect the spectrum of backgrounds and interests which informed late medieval and early modern writers’ intelligent approaches to alchemy. This research has shown that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in particular, copyists developed and refined ways of producing new texts and knowledge about substances and chymical products. As a bibliographical tool this publication provides material for future studies, for the project personnel as well as for researchers in related fields of the history of science and of intellectual and institutional history.
A case study emerging from this manuscript work, and thus the third leg of the project research, delivers an analysis of two sixteenth-century medical doctors’ manuscripts and engagement with alchemy. Although active outside of Vienna these doctors, especially doctor-apothecary Wolfgang Kappler of Krems, would have been affected by the institutionalisation of medicine at the University of Vienna: its Medical Faculty regulated the examination of medical students, the licensing of doctors and, through an ‘apothecary edict’ (German: ‘Apothekerordnung’), the prescription, manufacture and wholesale of remedies, beyond the area of the city itself. As this study shows, it was before this background that Kappler became interested in alchemical remedies. He acquired and copied an alchemo-medical manuscript of Innsbruck imperial physician Nicolaus Pol, whose library, in turn, was famous for its scientific collections; both Pol’s mentioned manuscript and parts of his library are lost today. Timmermann’s reconstruction of the libary’s rationale, the alchemo-medical manuscript’s history and both doctors’ approaches to collecting, sorting and using alchemical knowledge in their medical practice from surviving evidence constitute major contributions to the history of early modern knowledge.
The fourth and final cornerstone of the project’s results was facilitated by a commission for a Festschrift: the relevant honoured scholar, Prof. Joachim Telle, wrote a series of articles on the alchemical poetic contents of a particular Austrian manuscript codex (ÖNB Cod. 3001). Dr Timmermann’s previous project work on alchemical recipes in Viennese medical manuscripts enabled her to provide further context for these studies.
With regard to professional collaborations the interdisciplinary aspect of the project AlchemVienna translated to inter-institutional teaching (e.g. with the University of Vienna’s Classics department, which offered a course on Neo-Latin scientific texts in collaboration with Anke Timmermann). Additionally, both the Researcher and the Scientist in Charge were invited to contribute to University of Vienna’s 650th anniversary, especially concerning the medical and bibliographical aspects of the planned exhibition on the early University. Apart from presentations at academic conferences project-derived themes were also disseminated to the general public, including children, in various media and outreach activities (newspaper, radio, public presentations, blog posts and collaborations in international exhibitions).
In sum, this project represents a successful collaboration between Researcher (Dr Anke Timmermann) and the Scientist in Charge (assoc.Prof. PD Mag.Dr.phil. Dr.med. Sonia Horn). Its results not only represent stand-alone contributions to scholarship. They also demonstrate the vital role of interdisciplinary and source-based research for the history of science and thus, by extension, into modern integrated practices of medicine, science and embodied knowledge.