The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books from Antiquity to the Seventeenth-Century.

Beyond the preface, acknowledgments, and list of color plates, this handsome volume consists of four chapters plus a brief conclusion, a glossary of alchemical terms, bibliography, appendix, and indexes. It has two closely related aims: to serve as an introduction to alchemy, including its history, concepts, terms and presuppositions, and to illustrate alchemical writings with particular emphasis on "material from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the production and transmission of alchemical texts were at their height" (7). Throughout most of its history, alchemy was important not only as a legitimate (even if not easily defined) activity but also as it informed, indeed inspired, philosophy, poetry and the visual arts. Despite the broad and important influence of alchemy, scholarship concerning it remains in its infancy; this situation may be due to a combination of problems, including the difficulty of the ideas themselves, the difficult language in which they are expressed, and the number as well as the character of alchemical texts. The present volume both fulfills its goals, i.e., introducing the reader to alchemy and illustrating its visual images, and reflects the difficulties of alchemy as a topic.

The Mirror of Alchemy is divided into four chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter concerns the "Origins, Beginnings and Early Histories" of alchemy, including its mythical history, which claims Adam as the father of alchemy, given his knowledge of the nature of things in the Garden of Eden. The word "alchemy" is Arabic and "indicates that alchemy's immediate origins for medieval Europe were Arabic" (19), although medieval practitioners of alchemy (and other arts) sought Greek authority for their tradition. For this reason a discussion of "Early Greek Alchemy" (18-26) precedes that of "Arabic alchemy" (26-29).

"Alchemists and Their Writings" begins with thirteenth-century figures such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas and concludes with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English alchemists. This chapter indicates some of the difficulties faced by anyone working with this topic: Thomas Aquinas is included on the basis of his commentary on Aristotle's Meteorologica, a reference to alchemists within a discussion of the sale of fraudulent goods (S. T. 22, q. 77, a. 2, Resp.) and various apocryphal treatises alongside Roger Bacon to whom thirty alchemical works are ascribed (36).

In chapter three, "Alchemical Theories and Practices," we find a very brief summary first of Aristotle's theory of the elements, which was developed into alchemy, and then another on how the analysis of various substances presumably worked; and in chapter four there appear relatively independent (and also very brief) remarks concerning the rhetorical structure and some linguistic features of alchemical texts. The conclusion takes as its thesis the claim that alchemy is distinguished from chemistry by virtue of "its language and the assumptions that language embodied" (92). All of this occupies fifty-one pages, of which about half are filled with reproductions of texts from the British Library.

These reproductions, both color and black-and-white, are truly marvelous and give the book its primary interest. They are at once beautiful and important not only for the history of science, including alchemy, physics, and biology, but also for the history of art.

HELEN S. LANG