Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution.

Some years ago, William Newman was able to confirm that, as had previously been suspected, the influential alchemical treatises published under the pseudonym of Eirenaeus Philalethes were the work of George Starkey (1628-65). Now, in the present work, Newman combines an account of Starkey's career from his origins in Bermuda - where his interest in science manifested itself early on in the form of careful observation of local insect life - through his Harvard education (A.B. 1646) and subsequent years as a controversial medical and alchemical practitioner in the London of the 1650s and early 1660s, to his premature death in the 1665 plague outbreak, with an analysis of the content and cultural context of his openly acknowledged iatrochemical writings and of the arcane productions of Eirenaeus Philalethes. The result is a richly detailed account that provides many new insights into the intersection of medicine, natural philosophy, and alchemy in seventeenth-century education, medical practice, and scientific thought.

Thus, Newman shows that although Starkey himself made a rhetorical claim to have turned away from academic natural philosophy to the chemical philosophy and to alchemical practice, in actuality the natural philosophy teaching that he encountered at Harvard in the 1640s may well have fostered the development of his alchemical interests in various ways. For example, he is likely to have been taught a corpuscular theory of matter ultimately derived - via Julius Caesar Scaliger and influences from sixteenth-century Cambridge - from late medieval Aristotelian concepts of minima naturalia. Furthermore, not only was there general acceptance of the fundamentals of alchemical theory, but various members of the academic community showed an active interest in transmutational alchemy, often in combination with iatrochemistry.

In England, where he arrived in 1650, Starkey practiced Helmontian iatrochemical medicine, manufactured alchemically prepared remedies and perfumes, and nurtured a story that he was in receipt of secrets of alchemical transmutation given him by a mysterious adept in New England. These activities and claims initially secured him a respectful reception in the circle around Samuel Hartlib and by Robert Boyle himself. As Newman points out, although there were pragmatic reasons for Starkey's claims to portentous secret knowledge acquired second hand (the preservation of manufacturing processes and the desire to impress patrons), there is also no doubt that Starkey himself believed that he was the recipient of natural secrets of divine origin. Indeed, he seems to have resisted being used as Boyle's assistant in chemical experimentation designed by Boyle and to have tried to preserve the autonomy of his own alchemical projects while soliciting financial support from Boyle and members of the Hartlib circle. Hartlib became disillusioned with Starkey early in 1653, although Boyle continued to be interested in his work for some time thereafter. In the last decade of his life, Starkey made his living as a highly contentious and combative iatrochemical practitioner and pamphleteer in London's medical market place. Newman's thorough technical analysis of the iatrochemical writings Starkey published under his own name, as well as of his unpublished papers, rounds out the picture of a proficient and diligent iatrochemist, engaged in constant work in the laboratory.

Newman accompanies his account of Starkey's career with a comprehensive analysis of his pseudonymous alchemical writings. In a chapter that by itself constitutes a very useful and succinct narrative of current understanding concerning the history of Latin alchemy from the Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century, he traces the origins of Starkey's thought in earlier alchemical tradition, with special reference to corpuscular ideas in the medieval Latin alchemy of "Geber" (to the elucidation of which Newman's earlier work has largely contributed), Lullian alchemy, and the alchemical teaching of Paracelsus and Van Helmont. In the following chapter, Newman patiently unravels the metaphors, visual imagery, emblems, and figurative language that fill the writings of "Eirenaeus Philalethes." In a remarkable exposition, he both identifies many of the actual chemical reactions concealed under this language and shows that, in theoretical terms, these writings bring together ideas derived from Van Helmont, with the Geberian corpuscular theory of transmutation, and with ideas about matter probably derived from Starkey's Harvard education.

In addition to being a fascinating study of the mind and career of an alchemist, Newman's work throws additional light on the place of alchemy in the most advanced seventeenth-century scientific, commercial, and philosophical circles. It also helps to trace an enduring influence in European thought, for the works of Eirenaeus Philalethes continued to be reprinted in various languages, and referred to with respect, well into the eighteenth century. This impressive book continues William Newman's valuable contributions to the history of alchemy in medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe.

NANCY G. SIRAISI Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York