Fingers on buzzers for a quicky historical quiz: name these three historical characters and the unusual link they share…
- A 13th century speculative English monk
- A 14th century Parisian bookseller (and his wife)
- A 15th century Bohemian disbeliever in alchemy
How did you do?
The first one’s easy, particularly for Voynich Manuscript devotees – it’s the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. The second one’s also pretty easy, especially for Harry Potter fans – it’s Nicolas Flamel (and his wife Peronelle). The final one is next to impossible (unless you just happen to be Czech) – it’s Jan z Lazu (whose name has come up here in recent days). But what fine historical filament connects these three very different people?
The simple answer is that they were each declared to be famous alchemists long after their death, with their printed alchemical works well-read across Europe. Bacon’s supposed “Speculum Alchemiae” was translated into English in 1597; Flamel similarly first made the transition from obscure Parisian bookseller to noted “alchemist” in the late 16th century / early 17th century; and even though Jan z Lazu is recorded as having been “lucky to get away alive” when he told ex-Empress Barbara Celska (1390-1452) that the alchemy she was practising in Melnik (post-1441) was “fraudulent”, yet suddenly around 1611 printed works appeared in Prague attributing great alchemical secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone to him.
However, the more complex answer is (I think) that in each of these three cases alchemy was falsely attributed to the person in the decades around 1600 in order to further nationalistic quasi-historical purposes. Hence, the actual purpose of many alchemical texts from this period is not so much chrysopoeia (“gold-making”) as mythopoeia (“myth-making”) – people perceived that there was a pressing political need for an historical English / French / Czech alchemist to have existed, and so pressed existing historical figures into service. It might not make a lot of sense to us now, but that’s how it definitely worked way back then.
Incidentally, when in 2008 I asked the alchemy expert Adam McLean about Flamel-themed pseudo-alchemy, his response was well-nuanced and thoroughly helpful when considering this whole genre:-
Although contrived they are not "fakes" in the modern sense, rather they are attempts to reconstruct the past, by devising an object apparently emerging from a personality they wished had existed.
[...] and as on page o'erwitten without clue, with script and limning packed of various hue, and endless multitude of forms appear, some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer, each alien, except as kin from one remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.[...] Yes! `wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!