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A review by buermann
The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence M. Principe
5.0
Among the many anecdotes in this fascinating history Principe reports how in the early 18th century an alchemist by the name of Johann Friedrich Bottger was arrested for attempting to change lead into gold in a demonstration reported by no less than Leibniz. While serving his sentenence for alchemy -- a discipline often outlawed in the pre-modern world to fight counterfeiting, and whose modern incarnation is no less regulated -- Bottger was commanded to reproduce 15th century Ming ceramics. Johann winds up spending his life in a dungeon serving as the court alchemist reverse engineering Chinese technology.
So it was quite startling when I followed up with Trevor Levere's history of the same subject, "Transforming Matter", and in the first chapter Chinese interest in chemistry is breezily discounted as ending after the 1st century due to the introduction of Buddhism, a repitition of old Joe Needham's thesis for his self-titled grand question about why the scientific revolution didn't take off in China, though Levere offers no footnote or citation for the blanket assertion.
Historians of science spent the first half of the 20th century on a sort of collective project of demolishing the Draper-White conflict thesis regarding Christianity, but as soon as they turned to look outside Europe they just reproduced it, whether it's Buddhism in east Asia or al-Ghazali's occasionalism in Islam or what have you. In this case I'm left scratching my head wondering why, if the Chinese lost all interest in chemistry 1400 years prior, were European chemists literally slaving away to copy Chinese chemistry, and European empires colonizing half the planet in their quest for cheaper access to its tchotchkes.
Principe doesn't address that problem directly, but at least he's not part of it. His research reproducing old alchemical experiments is rather riveting. With the anti-alchemical laws driving the literature to use obfuscatory jargon to merely interpret medieval alchemical texts is no small feat, but then to reverse engineer the actual experiments is astonishing, with Principe and his colleagues discovering how tiny particulars -- like the distinct composition of ores from particular quarries -- dictated the reported results and would confuse efforts to reproduce an experiment, helping to explain the Whiggish tendency to treat medieval alchemy as charlatan nonsense.
So it was quite startling when I followed up with Trevor Levere's history of the same subject, "Transforming Matter", and in the first chapter Chinese interest in chemistry is breezily discounted as ending after the 1st century due to the introduction of Buddhism, a repitition of old Joe Needham's thesis for his self-titled grand question about why the scientific revolution didn't take off in China, though Levere offers no footnote or citation for the blanket assertion.
Historians of science spent the first half of the 20th century on a sort of collective project of demolishing the Draper-White conflict thesis regarding Christianity, but as soon as they turned to look outside Europe they just reproduced it, whether it's Buddhism in east Asia or al-Ghazali's occasionalism in Islam or what have you. In this case I'm left scratching my head wondering why, if the Chinese lost all interest in chemistry 1400 years prior, were European chemists literally slaving away to copy Chinese chemistry, and European empires colonizing half the planet in their quest for cheaper access to its tchotchkes.
Principe doesn't address that problem directly, but at least he's not part of it. His research reproducing old alchemical experiments is rather riveting. With the anti-alchemical laws driving the literature to use obfuscatory jargon to merely interpret medieval alchemical texts is no small feat, but then to reverse engineer the actual experiments is astonishing, with Principe and his colleagues discovering how tiny particulars -- like the distinct composition of ores from particular quarries -- dictated the reported results and would confuse efforts to reproduce an experiment, helping to explain the Whiggish tendency to treat medieval alchemy as charlatan nonsense.