Alchemist question.

[Dutch_guy]

On request of Peter Pan I'm posting this thread, he has a couple of questions concerning alchemists - which he cannot post over here because he is still a junior member.

This was his original post, in the entrance hall

hello every body ,I am the new one here.
i have some question about medieval alchemists,they are intimately related with monastey, are they always wanders? where can i find detailed life history about them?
thank you for help

So in short

- Were Medieval Alchemists intimatly related with the church/monastery?
- Were all the alchemists wanderers?
- Where can one find more information on them, particulary about their lives.

[Keba]

- I don think so, since they were looking for the source of immortality (among other things)
- again, I don't think so, but they were likely to travel a lot
- your Chemistry teacher? Books on chemistry in history ... Medieval alchemy was a must in my school, had a couple of lectures on it

Eh, that was all at least 6 years ago. About the only thing I remember was a comment from my teacher afterwards that turning lead into gold is possible today, but it costs waaaaay more than actualy gold, so it's not cost-effective.

[Aenlic]

It depends on what time period he wants to discuss. Alchemy was a court science in early China. As such it was protected. In Europe, alchemy began perhaps with the Greeks and Egyptians, usually as experiments by someone with rich patronage. The thriving Arabic civilizations, as opposed to the stagnant post-Roman collapse Dark Ages Europe, had alchemists.

If he means the European alchemists, then the "Art" of alchemy began to flourish in the 11th and 12th centuries. This may in part be due to the translations of Arabic and Greek texts by Jewish scholars in Moorish Spain which then made their way into the rest of Europe. Some influence may have come to Europe with knowledge brought back from the Crusades, as well.

Many alchemists were part of the church establishment. At the time, that is where most of the learning flourished; so it's to be expected. Albertus Magnus, also known as St. Albert the Great, and his student St. Thomas Aquinas were both alchemists. Both of them were Dominicans, although not necessarily monastics. Both are revered as "Doctors of the Church" by the Roman Church.

I'd say that most alchemists were probably linked in some way with the church and with monastics, simply because most of the centers of higher learning were run by the church and monastics like the Dominicans.

Later on, the church began to see alchemy as heretical along with many other fledgling "sciences" as they began to question church teachings. I suppose at that point many alchemists might have become "wanderers" as such. A treatise by Jean de Meung was called The Remonstrance of Nature to the Wandering Alchemist. I'm not sure what Peter Pan means by wandering.

There are a couple of great web sites out there, although you should take the ones that are decidely pro-Alchemy and entirely too New Age silly with a grain of salt.

http://www.alchemywebsite.com - a pretty comprehensive source with lots of material in multiple languages, if a bit too credulous for my tastes.

About.com has a good list of articles about Alchemy in the Middle Ages, including links to books about the subject available for purchase at places like Amazon.com and others.


For the lives of the alchemists, there is plenty written about the lives of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Other alchemists to look into would be people like Nicholas Flamel, Avicenna (the great Egyptian alchemist), Roger Bacon, George Ripley and Thomas Vaughn. Later on you have such famous people as Paracelsus and Sir Isaac Newton (oh, yes, he was very much into alchemy!).

[Vladimir]

It was based in Plato's(?) belief that all matter was made up of parts of the four elements. What it turned into was the belief that if something had elements of something else then that something could be changed into something else (lead to gold, etc). Alchemy was a powerful form of "magic" but the most powerful was (and still is?), numerology.