Court Authority and the University: Networks, Recipes, and Things-in-the-Making vs. the Abstractions of Made Things

Abstract

Making things by means of alchemical know-how, and the habits of knowledge used to sort, classify, and explain alchemy’s made things relied upon different traditions of learning and functioned as parts of separate knowledge networks, each making claims, in distinctive ways, to epistemic authority. When alchemy crossed the threshold of the early modern university, networks, and their epistemes, intertwined; and in one instance, the case of alchemical things-in-the-making at the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Kassel courts of Wilhelm IV and his son Moritz, one network affected the other as a result of a planned didactic encounter created by princely command. In the interaction, the local network of court experience at Kassel intersected with the more universal network of traditional pedagogy at the court’s university in Marburg. The entanglement produced both intellectual and social disturbance as traditional ways of knowing collided with practices supported by theoretical assumptions viewed as incompatible with established didactic method and logical claims to truth.