Robert Fludd’s Visual and Artisanal Episteme: A Case Study of Fludd’s Interaction with His Engraver, His Printer-Publisher, and His Amanuenses

Abstract

Robert Fludd was a thinker full of contradictions. He is famous for his theosophical system and for his experimental chymical constructions as well as for his Galenic medical practices. Furthermore, Fludd had his works published in luxurious folio formats by the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry, and the spectacular etchings and many of the engravings in his books were executed by Matthäus Merian the Elder. Fludd’s elaborate explanations of these images reveal him to be a natural philosopher who expressed his thoughts graphically. To what extent, however, were the ideas for the images, and the images in Fludd’s books themselves, his own? A discussion of preserved textual and image sources suggests that Fludd can indeed be understood as a chymical thinker and practitioner who contributed to the visual and artisanal episteme of his time. This article demonstrates this interpretation by using both well-known sources and the recently rediscovered, lavishly illustrated, master copy, Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main, MS lat. qu. 15, which served as a template for the section De technica microcosmi historia of Fludd’s main work Utriusque cosmi historia.