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Introduction

Producing the elixir of life was one of two major aims of medieval alchemists. Metallurgical alchemy, the transmutation of base metals, usually into gold or silver, was the other. Often discussed as a pseudoscience, alchemy in fact played a significant part in the genealogy of modern chemistry. It dealt, above all, with matter—its manipulation, improvement, and general properties. Sometimes limited to techniques that would be known to dyers, metal workers, and other artisans, in its most elaborated form alchemy was a scientia that explained the composition of the physical universe. Alchemy was tied quite closely to other disciplines of natural philosophy, including physics, astrology, and medicine. Yet in spite of its putative ability to explain the composition of material things, alchemy, unlike its sister disciplines, never gained a lasting foothold in the schools.

Perhaps because of this development, alchemy was not standardized. There was no single definition, nor a general curriculum. There were influential works, but as a practice outside or at the fringe of the university, medieval alchemy was idiosyncratic. Unlike, for instance, the study of theology or academic medicine, where students were expected to annotate specific texts with their master’s commentary, the decision to write about or practice alchemy was very much an expression of individual preference and circumstance. Therefore, it was not just detractors who argued with adherents over definitions of alchemy and its place within the fields of medieval scientiae and, more broadly, its proper role in Christendom. Adherents as well seldom agreed with one another on these questions. This is not without advantage to the historian, however. Alchemy’s marginality refracts, rather than reflects, normative intellectual life. It provides us a better perspective through which to understand the intellectual culture of the era, precisely because alchemical literature resists essentialization and generalization. This disunity of the literature was apparent enough that by the later Middle Ages, alchemical schools such as the Pseudo-Lullian recognized the messy reality of prior generations and sought to solve the problem through interpolations and elisions in the manuscript tradition.

Discord, however, required some common ground on which alchemical ideas could be debated. Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the practitioners and theoreticians of alchemy organized their discipline on then contemporary and widely accepted principles of natural philosophy.¹ Unlike philosophy, however, the theorization of alchemy often included a type of empirical practice. Medieval adherents of alchemy relied on observations and tests called experimenta (or sometimes documenta).² Robert Bartlett suggests that we might best translate terms like experimenta and experientia to mean observations, rather than experiments, in order to avoid confusion with the modern terminology. Still, what is important is that alchemists took into consideration the results of their practice, or the practice of others, rather than relying exclusively on argumentum (reasoning).³ This is not the same as saying that the sort of philosophical reasoning common to medieval philosophy was a subsidiary concern to physical trials. It is better to say that alchemical discourse, like natural philosophy, was founded on both reasoned argument and established opinion, but could—and did—account for alchemical praxis to inform its philosophical conclusions. Therefore, like chirurgery and empirical medicine, alchemy occupied space between the “liberal and manual arts” and consequently was held in less esteem than many of its sister disciplines.⁴

Latin commentators of the era—be they translators, practitioners, or skeptics—often referred to alchemy as a novitas (a novelty), a term that could connote disdain, but also signaled to the intellectual community the opening of a new scholarly question and endeavor.⁵ While it is true that some of the techniques and processes that made up the alchemical craft were known in the West well before the twelfth century, alchemy as a distinct branch of knowledge was no longer differentiated as such in the Latin West after the upheavals of late antiquity. It reemerged as a specific discipline over the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. What had remained in the early Middle Ages and into the beginning of the High Middle Ages was a collection of lore, recipes, techniques, and strands of classical medical theory—none of which operated under the formal rubric of alchemy. The Arab inheritors of antique alchemy fused the ancient Neoplatonic and Hermetic alchemical practices to Aristotelian natural philosophy, allowing alchemy to emerge as a coherent discourse, even if its adherents and detractors did not agree as to its precise potential or the justification for it.⁶ In the twelfth century the massive translation project that brought Aristotelian philosophy, the scientia of heavenly bodies and their motion (astronomy or astrology), and classical medicine into Western hands also brought with it alchemical texts.

Yet, what occurred was not simply translation. The magnitude of the importation also transformed alchemy. Western academics developed new theories, wrote their own texts, and brought their own cultural assumptions and prejudices to bear on the development of the scientia of alchemy. Aristotelian notions such as soul, essence, form, and material littered the landscape of the new alchemy, but did so weighted with meaning unintended by the Stagirite. Aristotle used a host of terms such as these as concepts meant to describe the world. In the alchemical texts of both Arabic and Latin provenance, however, these conceptual terms were used to discuss actual substances that could be manipulated in the laboratory. Essence was not an idea; it was a substance that could be identified, distilled, and manipulated.⁷ It is also important to bear in mind that, just as Aristotle never fully developed his chemical geology, neither did he discuss the possibility of transmutation. Therefore, the medieval alchemist, Islamic or Latin, often innovated or, at the very least, extrapolated to fill lacunae in the Aristotelian corpus.

Medicinal alchemy was largely a Western phenomenon. Terminology and essential theory were borrowed from translated treatises from the Islamic world, but the desire to use alchemy to make medicine was not a traditional theme of Islamic alchemists (though Islamic physicians certainly were interested in the possibility of making compound drugs). The elixir of life was the alchemical medicine par excellence, though its composition and precise properties tended to vary from writer to writer. Though the differences among theories of and instructions for making the elixir often prove revealing, it is possible to recognize some more or less general qualities of the substance. It was a universal medicine or cure-all, as well as a means by which one could significantly extend human life. The elixir did not promise immortality, however. Immortality was a quality reserved for God and the resurrected dead after the Last Judgment, though some alchemists blurred this distinction.

Given the pervasive, though hardly dominant clerical discourse that care for the body often came at the cost of care for the soul, it might seem surprising that a handful of Franciscans might give such a vaunted place to the elixir. The elixir, however, did not instill physical benefits only. It also could endow one with gifts that might be better described as spiritual, emotional, or intellectual. It could ease spiritual suffering. It cleared the mind and instilled confidence, bravery, and even intelligence. Just as metallurgical alchemists transmuted and ennobled a base metal into gold by removing its negative properties and instilling positive ones, so too did alchemists hope to purify, transmute, and ennoble the human body. The elixir’s ability to rewrite the composition of the human body transcended the power of most medicines. Nevertheless, the elixir was closely related to the development of compound drugs. The study and production of compound medicines, some of which required some artisanal skill to create, were part of the formal medical curriculum at the universities. Yet caution pervaded such discussions. At the University of Montpellier, for example, the foremost medical school of the later Middle Ages, masters were aware of the potential harm of new medicaments. Yet they allowed for the combination of drugs to also exhibit new properties that could not be explained by the combination of their basic ingredients.⁸ The compound drug called the theriac, for instance, rivaled the elixir in its potency according to some of its proponents, and, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, there can be some overlap between the theriac and the elixir. The general aim of even the most powerful compound drugs was to heal and repair certain conditions or illnesses. The elixir, however, transformed.

My study focuses principally on three Franciscans interested in the elixir. For two of them, Roger Bacon and John of Rupescissa, the elixir had the potential to reshape not only bodies, but the world. For the third “alchemist,” Franciscan cardinal and plagiarist Vitalis of Furno, the elixir was a powerful medicine and potentially transformative, but ultimately mundane. Spanning the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, the history of all these men and their alchemical works was tangled up with the turbulent history of the Franciscan Order. From the early flirtations with the apocalyptic works of Joachim of Fiore and the controversy over poverty, through the burgeoning of the Spiritual problem, to the immediate aftermath of Pope John XXII’s attacks on the Spirituals and on the core notion of Franciscan poverty itself, the Order was rent into pieces by conflicts both within and without. These troubles left their mark on each of the principal figures of this study.

I have tried, therefore, to balance the larger alchemical discourses with the individual features of the texts I have engaged in this study. Roger Bacon is among those historical figures whose legend outshines historical data.⁹ Many of the once salient details of Bacon’s life—persecution, arcane masteries, quintessential Englishness—emerge from rather unreliable sources at least a century after his death. We do know he was born sometime around 1214 or 1220, and died around 1292. Bacon finished his studies in Oxford probably by the mid-1230s, and may himself have been a master at Paris in the 1240s or earlier, though he was apparently back at Oxford shortly thereafter.¹⁰ Having already pursued an active academic career, he entered the Order of Friars Minor around 1256, just prior to Bonaventure’s elevation to the post of Minister General. Bacon’s admission came in the wake of the so-called scandal of the Eternal Gospel, when, in 1254, the young Franciscan Gerardo of Borgo San Doninno penned a text called the Introductorius, in which he claimed that Joachim of Fiore’s prophetic-exegetical works superseded scripture. This misstep provided the rivals and enemies of the Franciscans an opening through which to attack the Order. It is therefore difficult to countenance claims that Bacon took the Franciscan habit strictly as a means of advancement.

Bacon met Cardinal Guy Foulques, later Pope Clement IV, in 1263 or 1264. It was in the course of this conversation that Bacon first mentioned to the future pope the topics he would later include in his Opus maius (The Greater Work) and in the recapitulations and emendations of the Opus minus (The Lesser Work) and Opus tertium (The Third Work). In 1265, Guy became pope and the next year ordered Bacon to send him a treatise covering the issues they had discussed, as well as his insights on philosophy, theology, the secular-mendicant controversy at Paris, and the role of Aristotle. Bacon complied by hastily writing the Opera and neglected to submit it to his Franciscan superiors beforehand. A late fourteenth-century source claims that Bacon was condemned between 1277 and 1279. The cause of the condemnation is not known, except that it was due to various “novelties.” Bacon’s work offers a number of possible candidates for such a distinction, so it is certainly possible. In any case, around 1278 Bacon had departed Paris for Oxford, and the events of the years until the end of his life are unknown apart from the completion of a few works.

Vitalis of Furno’s reputation as an alchemist is almost nonexistent. He may not have even authored the encyclopedic treatise where his discussion of the elixir is found, though the book’s Franciscan provenance seems secure. Vitalis was better known as a careerist, whose academic interests seem to have existed only to serve his desire to climb the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He was born in Gascony sometime before 1260, but little is known of Vitalis’s life prior to his entrance into the university. We know he began his studies in theology at Paris around 1285, where he read the Sentences under Jacques de Quesnoy.¹¹ We do not know when he entered the Order, but he returned to Montpellier as a lector at the Franciscan studium in 1291, and a few years later returned to Paris. In the closing years of the century he was lector at Toulouse, though Stephen Marrone points to 1300 as the effective end of his academic career. Still, it was far from the end of his intellectual life. In 1307 he was named Provincial in Aquitaine. In 1312 Clement V named him cardinal priest of St. Martin in Montibus, and in 1321 John XXII elevated him to cardinal bishop of Albano. He died in 1327.¹² Vitalis was a staunch supporter of the conventual movement and was a strong ally of the pope almost to the end of his life. Like many of his confreres, Vitalis objected to John XXII’s attacks on the Franciscan understanding of the absolute poverty of Christ. He rather spectacularly fell out of favor when the pope viciously harangued him in consistory.

John of Rupescissa was born around 1310.¹³ We do not know much about his early life, except that he was born into the lesser nobility in Aurillac and obviously procured enough education for himself to enroll at the University of Toulouse in 1327. Later in life he remembered his university years as a tumultuous time, where he was caught up in worldly things. John remained at the university for five years before joining the Order. In the same year he took the Franciscan habit he claims to have had his first vision of Antichrist. John initially kept his visions to himself, only revealing them some years later in a Franciscan chapter meeting in 1335 or 1336, along with his prediction of hostilities between England and France, which led eventually to his fame as a prophet of the Hundred Years War.

John’s initial reluctance to share his visions appears to have been justified, for his Franciscan superiors did not share his conclusion that God desired him to speak of what he had seen. By 1344, these superiors, led by Guillaume Farinier, provincial of Aquitaine, had heard enough. They confined John to a small cell in the Franciscan convent of Figeac. John remembers the time in Figeac as one of great suffering. He was placed on a rack for treatment of a broken leg, and left bound in irons to rot in his own filth for more than three months, with maggots crawling over his infected wounds. John survived, strengthened in his own belief that God had granted to him a special enlightenment. The bodily trials of Figeac subsequently gave way to trials of a legal nature. John was shuttled between various Franciscan convents and was tried for heresy for the first time in 1346 by a local Dominican inquisitor. The conclusion of the inquisition apparently did not suit Farinier, who rearrested John and sent him to be imprisoned in Toulouse and later in Rieux.

John’s sufferings continued. He contracted the plague while in prison, prompting more visions. But again, he survived. He eventually managed to convince a sympathetic captor to take him to the papal court at Avignon instead of to the next in the lengthening series of Franciscan convents that served as his jails. At Avignon, John was treated better, and as part of his examination by the cardinal inquisitor, he was asked to compose a lengthy description of his visions of the future, rather than merely to submit whatever previous writings he had with him. After much debate, and after a trial in which John roundly condemned the excesses of the clergy, he finally was declared fantasticus, but not hereticus. Upon this finding, he was remanded again to prison, where he would stay until he was allowed to enter the local Franciscan convent just prior to his death. Though John railed against his jailing, the papal prison in Avignon proved an excellent writer’s workshop. It was there that he composed all his surviving works. Indeed, John became a fecund author, with more than twenty books written before his death, and he was frequently sought out for prophetic advice.

Each of these friars contributed to alchemical discourse and the elixir tradition in his own way, yet they also represent a particular period in the history of alchemy. I consider only these works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not simply as a means to limit the scope of the project, but also because the turn of the fifteenth century heralded a shift in alchemical writing and praxis. It was around this time when, as Pamela Smith has noted, there was a surge in the production of technological books written in the vernacular—a change in the production of alchemical treatises that intensified with the invention of printing.¹⁴ In the wake of these developments, alchemy became a much more widespread practice both in the marketplace and at home, changing the character of the discipline.

* * *

It is worth asking whether Bacon, Vitalis, and John were tied together by something more than their membership in the Friars Minor and their interest in the elixir. Was there a Franciscan alchemy? If by Franciscan alchemy we mean something along the lines of a school, I think not. On the other hand, lived Franciscanism—insofar as each author understood or experienced it—played a significant role in the alchemical works of each. It is the nexus between Franciscanism and alchemy that is the subject of this book. It is through the particularities of these relationships that broader connections and ruptures between medieval religion and science come into view.

I have conceptualized this study, therefore, as a history around science. At its most basic, it describes and situates the pursuit of the elixir within the intellectual, religious, and political culture of the friars who wrote about it.¹⁵ Taking this method further, I present three related, but distinct arguments. First, writing about alchemy—no matter how few Franciscans did so—did not require a radical intellectual break with the rest of Franciscan intellectual culture. This is especially true of writings on the elixir, but can be applied more broadly to alchemy as a whole. Second, for the friars of this study alchemy’s materiality and attention to the physical world was what conspicuously linked it to religion. Alchemy’s focus on the corporeal was neither an impediment nor superfluous to its connection to religion, nor was it a degradation of an erstwhile purely spiritual experience. Instead, the development of these Franciscan alchemies emerged in a period when Christians across Europe were focusing on and seeking for material evidence of their faith and material means of practicing their devotion. The doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection dealt inherently with the material world, but more to the point Christian practice was thoroughly intertwined with matter. The Eucharist, baptism, devotional art, relics and reliquaries, and even the smells and sounds of the Mass speak to the importance of the corporeal.¹⁶ Third, the religious and even the liturgical world of the Franciscans left an impact on their alchemical works.

The intellectual genealogy of this latter argument owes much to the work of Leah DeVun and Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, both of whom have explored this topic as it relates to John of Rupescissa and Roger Bacon, and each has demonstrated the importance of reading alchemical texts in light of an author’s larger oeuvre and other circulating discourses.¹⁷ Adopting this method myself, I also want to add what may seem a counterintuitive argument—that not only did religious thought influence alchemical writings, but also religious practice. By practice I mean principally Franciscan ritual life. Ritual life was frequently formalized into liturgical structures, but these structures did not necessarily limit improvisation and imagination. Too often ritual is understood in terms of things that are “ritualistic,” overemphasizing formulas or ossified repetitions. Here, I mean ritual as a mode of being in the world. Following the work of J. Z. Smith and, more recently, of Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon, I focus on ritual as a means of approaching the world subjunctively, that is, as it could or should be. Like the ritual itself, subjunctivity is ephemeral and fleeting, but it privileges the experience of meaning and connection. Franciscan ritual life therefore had implications for how one “thought” alchemy, for it could explain both the extraordinary potential of alchemical science and the inevitable clash between potentiality and the empirical inability of the elixir to achieve its reputed effects. Alchemy as a subjunctive science expresses conditional truths.

The fact that religious and scientific thought are deeply imbricated with one another in discussions of the elixir points to something deeper than a mere overlay of religious language onto alchemical theory. While it is possible to disentangle the alchemical praxis (the production of a chemical compound) from religious aspirations, the character of the substances created—the nature of the elixir of life—is deeply influenced by theological and ritual assumptions that are too tightly entangled in the science to be unwound. Moreover, there is a real danger of fundamentally misunderstanding the historical actors and their ideas if we attempt to remove the scientific marrow and examine it separately from its context.¹⁸

Medieval distinctions in genre have little to do with separating “science” from “religion,” in any case. Both terms—religion and science—are in fact anachronisms when applied to the Middle Ages. The basic meaning of scientia was knowledge, but the actors in this study better understood scientia a field of knowledge that was systematically organized and intelligible via the application of reason. Hence, theology and ethics were scientiae just as was optics or (another difficult term to translate) astronomia. Likewise religio meant something like an obligation to worship. The term “religious” in the Middle Ages tended to refer not to people of a spiritual frame of mind, but to men and women who lived under a religious rule—a designation that included a wide range of categories to be sure, but also one that limited the religious to a place within the hierarchy of the Christian Church. Much as we read “science” back into the Middle Ages, often by substituting the term for what medievals called natural philosophy, likewise we read “religion” back into the Middle Ages for a wide variety of texts and behaviors. My goal is not to muddy the waters here by claiming that modern terminology is of no value, but simply to recognize that modern terms generate modern assumptions about division of knowledge that do not necessarily hold true when applied to medieval Europe.

Science is, to adapt a theory from Dipesh Chakrabarty, a colonizing and totalizing discipline.¹⁹ Historians now recognize that the development of science, in the modern sense, was hardly a necessary series of events and, moreover, that it developed in fits and starts quite different from the clear narrative of progress proposed by scholars less than a century ago. Yet, for all of our recognition of proto-scientific practices that include nonscientific qualities, the logic of science nevertheless dictates that we make this very distinction, that the practice of alchemy can include both scientific and nonscientific aspects. To put it another way, the existence of science today presupposes a past where its antecedents existed. This may seem something of a tautology, but the critical issue at stake here is that such an observation implies a kind of division in the practice of alchemy that would not have been recognizable to its adherents. Science per se never existed—nor does it now—as anything more than a discourse. Discourses are powerful things, to be sure, but they are always contested, and, just as importantly, they emerge in the context of specific individuals, each of whom is positioned within a correspondingly specific cultural and historical matrix and freighted by individual experiences. By retrojecting the discourse of science into the past we draw distinctions that are useful to understanding the genealogy of the present, but tend to obfuscate in trying to recreate historical thought worlds.

Something similar could be said about casting modern definitions of religion into history. During the Enlightenment and well into the twentieth century, a number of scholars understood religion to have developed on a teleological path (usually toward Protestant Christianity or atheism). While this view is rather muted today, religion is even more likely than science to be essentialized. The movement to study lived religion has done much to capture the richness of religious practice, but Christianity is still used as something of a monolithic term. It is not a given that Christians of the thirteenth or the fourteenth century are intrinsically recognizable to Christians of the twenty-first, or that outside observers would classify them as a group. The survival of a tradition is not enough on its own to presume its intelligibility. Likewise, we need not expect uniformity when it comes to religious practice or belief. The obsession of the clerical class to regulate religious behavior in the later Middle Ages is proof enough that the ideal of uniformity remained an ideal only. Medieval alchemical texts also show, rather less ostentatiously, their own divergence on questions of religion. Even after what William Newman has termed the “religious turn”—an efflorescence of religious language in alchemical texts—in the early fourteenth century, great numbers of what we might call naturalist texts continued to be produced.²⁰ These texts might make no mention of God at all, or, at most, frame the alchemical pursuit within a universe created and governed by God, who acted more or less as simply a guarantor and source of natural laws. While this is sufficient, I think, to qualify as a religious idea, it is qualitatively different from characterizing alchemy as divinely revealed knowledge.

One of the problems posed by religious language is that it has led to some confusion as to the principal aim of the alchemist. The history of religion has a particularly troubled historiography on this score, rather in contrast with the work of historians of science in recent decades, who have demonstrated quite convincingly that alchemy focused on the manipulation of matter.²¹ In the 2004 Encyclopedia of Religion under the heading “alchemy,” the reader will find the statement by Mircea Eliade for the 1987 edition that “alchemy was not scientific, but spiritual.”²² Eliade was far from the first to make this claim, preceded in the twentieth century by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who posited that the coded language of alchemy symbolized an untranslatable psychic or mystical journey. Eliade, in his work The Forge and the Crucible, expressed the idea that alchemy was a spiritual process aimed not at the transformation of matter, but at that of the soul. Eliade concentrated on the experience of alchemical creation, equating it with a mystical, even gnostic, religiosity that was consciously ahistorical and impenetrable.²³ In addition to mischaracterizing the physical manipulation of matter as superfluous—transmuting physical substances was always at the heart of alchemy, even if the compound itself had soteriological implications—Eliade also narrowed the sense of religion to a kind of irrational mystical experience. Irrationality is not in and of itself the problem. Historians have had some success when it comes to dealing with the putatively irrational. Emotions, sexuality, mysticism, and madness have all been brought into the domain of historical study, even if debates about conclusions and methodology remain. Instead, when alchemy is characterized as a form of esoteric mysticism that denies the importance of or seeks to transcend the material world, the picture of how religion and religious persons intersected with alchemy becomes drastically skewed. This essentialized view of religion omits theology, ritual, scripture, and, for good measure, historical context. If religious experience is limited to an ephemeral, intangible, incommunicable experience with “real” presence, there remains no space for the materiality of alchemy to influence religious thought or behavior and vice versa. Therefore, this study works with religion as a cultural and historical category rather than an exogenous definition of what “real” religion is. In so doing, the connections between alchemy and religion come into sharper focus.

Materiality, of course, is not the only connection to be made between alchemy and religion. By the turn of the fourteenth century, many alchemical writers specifically framed their works with Christian ideas about the nature of God and the universe to make it easier, both morally and metaphorically, to grasp its essential principles. A good example of this phenomenon comes from the fourteenth-century Codicil, which compares the process of alchemical transmutation to the role of Christ in salvation: “Just as Christ assumed human form to liberate mankind from the transgression of Adam and its imprisonment by sin, so is it in our art. What is foully stained by one thing is cleansed by its opposite from that wicked taint … so approaching the limit of perfection, it becomes more perfect.”²⁴ Barbara Obrist has argued that allegory, metaphor, and analogy served a rhetorical function. Rather than being a means of concealing knowledge, the florid imagery, allegory, metaphor, and specifically Christian themes helped render alchemical precepts understandable to a new audience. For a number of authors of this period, however, alchemy was not simply described in Christian nomenclature, but was fused to Christian conceptions of the universe.²⁵ The need to explicate alchemy, then, is not sufficient in and of itself to explain the rise in religious language and ideas occurring in alchemical texts. We must look also at the discourses that were co-opted in the course of the flourishing of religious alchemical texts.

My method, then, is to read Franciscan elixir texts within the context of related discourses. This allows me to examine the relationship of religion and science within the conceptual frameworks native to the period, such as alchemy, natural philosophy, and apocalypticism. In so doing, I seek to avoid essentializing science and religion without losing either as a constructive, critical category. This particularist reading operates on two basic assumptions, each of which will be borne out throughout the discussion. The first is that discourses are porous. Genre and other discursive boundaries might restrict the content or presentation of a work, but they do not forbid influence (conscious or otherwise) from one field to another. This seems intuitively true for any individual author, but we also have evidence, for instance, from the thirteenth-century Franciscan chronicler Salimbene de Adam that friars frequently were exposed to new or controversial opinions through conversation and disputation.²⁶ It is important to attend, then, to the range of informal and formal discourses across the network of the Franciscan Order. Second, a genealogical model is more productive for understanding connections between religion and alchemy than is a developmental or a synthetic model. These Franciscans built their alchemies from many sources—Aristotelian commentaries, theological claims, and scriptural writings—but not always from the same sources, and they did not draw identical conclusions. Important similarities and themes emerge among various writers that are respective of their context, but the works fit comfortably neither in a narrative of progress nor as an expression of a singular idea.

Historical context is the subject of Chapter 1. In this chapter, I examine Franciscan discussions of the natural world. Remarking on the Franciscan pursuit of alchemy, Lynn Thorndike offered this gem: “The recording angel must smile frequently at the little ironies of history. One of these amusing inconsistencies of real life is that followers of St. Francis, the apostle of poverty, should have interested themselves in making gold.”²⁷ While the accumulation of wealth would certainly have appeared unseemly to critics of the Order, the pursuit of alchemy in and of itself was in fact consistent with the Order’s interest in the natural world. Multiple generations of Franciscan authors, including the Order’s founder, are deeply invested in the celebration and investigation of the natural world. As Francis’s Canticle to Brother Sun illustrates, the earth and the very elements that formed it were a donum Dei, a gift of God. The Order’s founder saw no conflict between the spiritual life and the material world. Later commenters would turn the focus of Francis’s devotion to a more considered treatment of natural philosophy. Bonaventure and Peter Olivi in particular argued that natural philosophy was essential to plumbing the spiritual value of the cosmos. Olivi’s adherence to a literal understanding of Genesis only reinforced the pursuit of natural philosophy as a necessity. Therefore, however marginal the study of alchemy was to Franciscan intellectual life, it was hardly out of step with general intellectual currents within the Order.

The second chapter turns to the elixir tradition proper. Tracing the genealogy of various elixirs underscores the centrality of cosmological traditions and assumptions in the formulation of this cure-all. Though each author maintains an adherence to a broad Aristotelian concept of alchemy and natural philosophy, Christian theology and canon law are critical to the development of specific iterations of the elixir. Roger Bacon models the elixir’s powers on the Christian concept of the resurrected body. The alchemy ascribed to Vitalis of Furno appears to be shaped narrowly to fall within the confines of what is licit according to the Franciscan Order and the papal curia. John of Rupescissa considers his elixir to be a literal distillation of heaven. While each substance is a cure-all, there is great diversity in the nature of the compounds, not all of which can be explained solely by resort to alchemical traditions. Religion may constrain or inspire the alchemist, but it is never incidental.

In the third chapter, I take up the role of apocalypticism in relation to alchemy. The Franciscan Order was thoroughly embroiled in apocalyptic speculation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As intramural disputes over poverty and the legacy of Francis heightened apocalyptic rhetoric, those brothers not consumed with the approach of the end times still had to deal with those who were. Apocalyptic speculation was part of the oeuvre of each of the alchemical authors under consideration, and, as such, I treat it independently of other religious ideas. Given the few alchemical texts emerging from the Order in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it would be foolish to suggest that Franciscan theology or apocalyptic thought generated alchemical thought. Yet, on their own both alchemy and apocalyptic thought offered the possibility of realizing the spiritual in the material world. Taken together, these practices could be mutually reinforcing.

Chapter 4 takes on the issue of Franciscan religious practice. While there is a tradition of alchemy as a religious practice in late antiquity, I argue that the devotional aspects of Bacon’s and Rupescissa’s elixirs are better approached through the lens of Franciscan ritual life. Franciscans, like all regular orders, marked their days, years, and lives liturgically. I discuss briefly how these liturgies opened up a means of recontextualizing the relationship to God and the cosmos. While I do not argue that alchemy was a ritual per se, the production of the elixir seems to be enhanced when the alchemist enters the ritual mode. The devotional approach to alchemy opened new avenues for these medieval theorists to interpret their practice and their results.