The Sources of Science No. 39 : Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum

Elias, Ashmole; Debus, Allen G.

Johnson Reprint Corp., 1967

[A reprint of the London Edition, 1652] Bound in blue cloth. Gilt lettering. Top edge blue. Hardcover. Good binding and cover. Light edge wear. Clean, unmarked pages. xlix, [19], 486, [9] pages : illustrations, portrait (1 folded sheet) ; 24 cm. 

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum is perhaps the seminal volume of English alchemical literature. Most significantly, it brings together a number of hermetic works previously only available in privately held manuscripts, including, as the subtitle has it, 'severall poeticall pieces of our famous English philosophers, who have written the hermetique mysteries in their owne ancient language'. Among these famous English philosophers were John Gower, George Ripley, Thomas Norton, and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose alchemically themed 'Tale of the Canans Yeoman' is excerpted from The Canterbury Tales. >

From the library Dr. Owen Hannaway. Hannaway was director of the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at Johns Hopkins University. He authored numerous books and served as an editor of academic magazines in the history of science. Partial list of publications: Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (1975); Observation, Experiment, and Hypothesis in Modern Physical Science (1985); The Evolution of Technology (1989); Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (1994); and The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (1996).