ISBN: 9781400883578

In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixt… Plus…

In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth. Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher’s career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged. Digital Content>E-books>World History>Europe History>Europe History, Princeton University Press Digital >16<

ISBN: 9781400883578

Princeton University Press European History Philosophy; Paracelsus; Alchemy; Wealth; Natural philosophy; Science; Ruler; Writing; Samuel Hartlib; Magnum opus (alchemy); Johann Joachim Bec… Plus…

Princeton University Press European History Philosophy; Paracelsus; Alchemy; Wealth; Natural philosophy; Science; Ruler; Writing; Samuel Hartlib; Magnum opus (alchemy); Johann Joachim Becher; Rosicrucianism; Landgrave; Hanau; Theory; Tax; Chemical industry; Cambridge University Press; The Philosopher; Apothecary; Philosopher; Recipe; Theosophy; Paracelsianism; Technology; Francis Bacon (artist); Rhetoric; Evocation; Literature; Museum; Henry Oldenburg; The New Science; Mercantilism; Workhouse; Scientific revolution; Scholasticism; Astrology; Industrial espionage; Disputation; Tincture (heraldry); Paperback; Early modern period; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; Renaissance art; Deutsches Museum; Speyer; Philology; Experimental philosophy; Physician; Pseudoscience; Athanasius Kircher; Lynn Thorndike; Melange (fictional drug); Whipple Museum of the History of Science; Neoplatonism; Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Natural magic; University of Chicago Press; Invention; Holy Roman Empire; Nuremberg; Simon Schaffer; Perpetual motion; William R. Newman; Accademia del Cimento; Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition; Agriculture; Regiomontanus; Autodidacticism; Turba Philosophorum; Technoscience; Adage; Phlogiston theory; Apprenticeship; Die Zeit; Lecture; Narrative; Adolf; Werner Sombart; Dowsing; Chinese alchemy; Chrysopoeia; Stephen Greenblatt; Thomas Hobbes; Romanticism; Jacques Le Goff; Corporatism; Aristotelianism; Fernand Braudel; Industrialisation; Aphorism; Allegory; Testimonial; Ennoblement; Treatise; Ducat; The Order of Things; Calculation; Collegiants; Accademia dei Lincei 9780691056913, UK,GB,DE,ES,FR,IT,US,CA,MX,AU,NZ 20160920 English History, Princeton University Press<

2016, ISBN: 9781400883578

Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, eBooks, eBook Download (PDF), Auflage, [PU: Princeton University Press], [ED: 1], Princeton University Press, 2016

2016, ISBN: 9781400883578

Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, eBooks, eBook Download (EPUB,PDF), [PU: Princeton University Press], Princeton University Press, 2016

2016, ISBN: 9781400883578

Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, eBooks, eBook Download (PDF), [PU: Princeton University Press], Princeton University Press, 2016