Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry.

William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. xvi + 344 pp. index. bibl. $40. ISBN: 0-226-57711-2.

This is an original and important book both for its investigation of primary sources and for its reinterpretation of the early modern disciplines encompassing alchemy and "chymistry," the latter an actors' term used by the authors to distinguish early modern practices from the modern discipline of chemistry. At the heart of the study is a detailed analysis of the laboratory notebooks of George Starkey (1627-65), an American, Harvard-educated physician and "chymist" who worked in England in the 1650s. Starkey undertook extensive experiments, writing treatises under his own name and alchemical tracts under the pseudonym, Eirenaeus Philalethes. This study entails an investigation of Starkey's private, unpublished, and unique laboratory notebooks. In the skilled hands of Newman and Principe, the notebooks yield an understanding of actually laboratory practices in the seventeenth century, creating a basis for their cogent analysis of Starkey's experimental methodology. The notebooks also illuminate the work of other key figures such as Joan Baptista Van Helmont and Robert Boyle. Unexpectedly, the study shows that Starkey's methodology and specific findings often were often adopted without acknowledgment by his contemporaries such as Boyle. The authors also carefully demonstrate the influence of Starkey on successors such as Wilhelm Homberg and even Antoine Lavoisier.

Newman and Principe decisively end views of early modern alchemy as a largely spiritual or psychic enterprise on the one hand, and as a merely "empiric" practice of random procedures without theory on the other. Repeatedly, they demonstrate that Van Helmont and Starkey were engaged in genuine experimentation in every sense of the word. Examples include Van Helmont's numerous careful determinations of specific weights and Starkey's work on mercury and antimony or his great project entailing thousands of experiments to discover a single method of developing all sulphurs into medicines. The training of one of the authors (Principe) as both chemist and historian undoubtedly enabled the detailed analysis of textual sources in terms of what actually occurred or may have occurred in the laboratory. The deep commitment of this study to investigating actual practices in the laboratories of seventeenth-century "chymists," and the richly detailed material of the notebooks themselves that allows such an analysis, contributes to the importance of this study. The authors show that Starkey's methodology thoroughly integrated theory and practice.

Alchemy Tried in the Fire breaks down the traditional view of a chemical revolution in which alchemy is separate from the development of modern chemistry with Robert Boyle viewed as the "father of chemistry." While this study demonstrates far more continuity in the practice of experimentation than the traditional view allows, it is also careful to notice the profound differences between early modern "chymistry" and alchemy (disciplines that are not clearly distinguishable in the seventeenth century) and modern chemistry. The influence of "medieval" Scholasticism on Starkey's laboratory notebooks is clearly shown. Having acquired Scholastic training at Harvard college, he combined Scholastic methods with experimental ones. Further, the authors demonstrate that Starkey acquired metallurgical knowledge and skills from men engaged in New England ironworks. The alchemical/chymical discipline, and practical assaying and metalworking were partially overlapping practices.

Starkey's experimental methodology included features that would be quite foreign to the practices of modern chemistry. He always started from an authoritative text and never rejected its statements as false. Carefully testing such "facts" in the laboratory, he viewed lack of experimental verification as the result of textual misinterpretation. At times his initial data consisted of divine inspiration. Yet whatever his starting point, Starkey tested everything "in the fire" in a thoroughgoing, meticulous fashion.

Secrecy and pseudonymous authorship were standard practices. Newman and Principe do an excellent job of explicating forms of concealment as they also explore issues of originality and authorship. Yet alchemical secrecy was vigorously criticized as early as the sixteenth century by metallurgists such as Vannoccio Biringuccio and the humanist metallurgical author Georg Agricola. To explore this critique of alchemical secrecy is not to adopt a traditional narrative positing a transition from early modern secrecy to modern open science as the authors seem to suggest. The overlap of practical metallurgy and alchemy/chymistry is well established, but it is a subject that needs much more investigation. The authors' fascinating discussion of Starkey and New England metalworkers is a most welcome contribution to this topic.

If I have one criticism of this book, it is its occasional tendency to create "straw-men" of previous scholars whose work is being criticized or revised. The caricature of the traditionally portrayed alchemist at the beginning of chapter 2 may be accurate for earlier decades of the twentieth century, but surely not for recent scholarship on alchemy. Finely nuanced contextual studies of medieval and early modern alchemy are becoming commonplace. In recent years, historians of science in many subdisciplines have explored early modern practices and actors' categories, rejecting a simplistic narrative development from early modern to modern. This book is a highly exemplary example of these well-established historiographic stances. Its core originality subsides in its investigation of actual laboratory practices in wonderful detail, a result of both the nature of Starkey's notebooks and the skill of the authors.

PAMELA O. LONG

Washington, D.C.