Jennifer M. Rampling, The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700, Synthesis series, paperback (2020; paperback ed., Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2023), xvii, 408 pp., 16 halftone figures

Abstract

In the brief but essential preface to The Experimental Fire, Jennifer Rampling poses a question that she intends to answer in different ways for different English alchemists she considers: “how, exactly, did book learning interact with practical experience?” (4). Related to this are two large questions. First of all, how did English alchemists think of themselves in relation to predecessors going back at least a millennium and to texts in Greek and Arabic that were only translated into Latin in and after the twelfth century? Were the English practitioners restoring the operations claimed by authors since at least Zosimos in the early fourth century C.E. Were they reinterpreting the texts for their time? Or were they doing both? Second, and just as important, how does anyone go about reading an alchemical text?